Related Experiment Video

Updated: Jul 13, 2026

A Novel Experimental and Analytical Approach to the Multimodal Neural Decoding of Intent During Social Interaction in Freely-behaving Human Infants
11:14

A Novel Experimental and Analytical Approach to the Multimodal Neural Decoding of Intent During Social Interaction in Freely-behaving Human Infants

Published on: October 4, 2015

Do you believe in magic? Infants' social looking during violations of expectations

Tedra Walden1, Geunyoung Kim, Carrie McCoy

  • 1Department of Psychology and Human Development, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN 37203, USA. tedra.walden@vanderbilt.edu

Developmental Science
|August 9, 2007
PubMed

Insights

Young infants seek social context when encountering unexpected physical events. Even at 6 months, babies look to caregivers more during surprising cognitive or perceptual scenarios.

Area of Science:

  • Developmental Psychology
  • Cognitive Science
  • Infant Perception

Background:

  • Infants possess innate knowledge of physical principles like numerosity and occlusion.
  • Previous research focused on infant looking times at physical events, with less attention to the social context.
  • Caregiver presence is common during infant studies, but its role in expectation violation is underexplored.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To investigate the social component of expectation violations in young infants.
  • To examine whether infants seek social information during unexpected cognitive/perceptual events.
  • To determine the age at which infants integrate social cues with physical event understanding.

Main Methods:

  • Replication of established physical knowledge experiments (addition/subtraction, occlusion) with 6- and 9-month-old infants.
  • Measurement of infant looking times at expected versus unexpected events.
  • Observation and quantification of infants' social looking behaviors directed at caregivers.

Main Results:

  • Infants at both 6 and 9 months looked longer at unexpected events compared to expected events, confirming prior findings.
  • Infants initiated significantly more looks toward their caregivers' faces during unexpected events than during expected events.
  • This social seeking behavior was observed in both studied age groups.

Conclusions:

  • Infants as young as 6 months actively use social referencing to interpret unexpected physical and cognitive events.
  • The findings suggest that social context plays a crucial role in early cognitive development and learning.
  • Infants integrate perceptual experiences with social information, even in the first year of life.

More Related Videos

Exploring Infant Sensitivity to Visual Language using Eye Tracking and the Preferential Looking Paradigm06:07

Exploring Infant Sensitivity to Visual Language using Eye Tracking and the Preferential Looking Paradigm

Published on: May 15, 2019

Defining the Role Of Language in Infants' Object Categorization with Eye-tracking Paradigms07:31

Defining the Role Of Language in Infants' Object Categorization with Eye-tracking Paradigms

Published on: February 8, 2019

Related Concept Videos

Magical Thinking01:29

Magical Thinking

Magical thinking encompasses the belief in assumptions that defy logical reasoning yet appear intuitively convincing. It is a common psychological phenomenon that persists across various cultural and individual contexts. While these assumptions contradict empirical evidence and scientific laws, they often serve meaningful psychological roles in promoting emotional resilience and a sense of control, especially under stress or uncertainty.Thought-Action Fusion and the Law of SimilarityA key...
Piaget's Stage 1 of Cognitive Development01:14

Piaget's Stage 1 of Cognitive Development

The sensorimotor stage, the initial phase of Jean Piaget's theory of cognitive development, spans the first two years of a child's life. During this period, infants actively engage with their surroundings, building cognitive awareness through direct interaction with the world. This interaction is primarily based on sensory perception and motor actions, allowing infants to gradually understand basic physical properties and predict how objects interact within their environment.
Exploration...
The Nativist Approach01:21

The Nativist Approach

The nativist approach to infant cognitive development proposes that infants are born with inherent knowledge structures that allow them to interpret the world almost immediately. This perspective contrasts with earlier developmental theories, such as those proposed by Jean Piaget, which emphasized a more gradual acquisition of cognitive abilities through interaction with the environment. One key concept in this approach is object permanence — the understanding that objects continue to exist...
Relationship with Parents: Attachment01:28

Relationship with Parents: Attachment

Parent-child interactions lay the foundation for how we understand relationships throughout life. These interactions are not uniform across families; instead, they are shaped by a range of environmental, emotional, and behavioral factors unique to each caregiver-child dynamic. Social psychologists study these early relationships to understand how patterns formed in infancy influence social functioning and interpersonal behavior in adulthood.Attachment Theory and Early Relational ModelsJohn...
Attachment01:20

Attachment

Attachment is vital for infant development, as warm social interactions support growth and well-being. In a classic 1958 study by Harry Harlow, the significance of warmth and comfort in forming attachments was examined. Harlow separated newborn monkeys from their mothers and provided two artificial "mothers": one made of cold wire and the other covered in soft cloth. Despite the wire mother offering food, the infant monkeys preferred the comfort of the cloth mother, demonstrating that physical...
Observational Learning01:12

Observational Learning

Albert Bandura's observational learning, also known as imitation or modeling, occurs when a person observes and imitates another's behavior. It is a quicker process than operant conditioning. A well-known example is the Bobo doll study, where children who saw an adult acting aggressively towards the doll were more likely to act aggressively when left alone, compared to those who observed a nonaggressive adult. Many psychologists view observational learning as a form of latent learning because...