Expectancy violations promote learning in young children

Children, including infants, have expectations about the world around them, and produce reliable responses when these expectations are violated. However, little is known about how such expectancy violations affect subsequent cognition. Here we tested the hypothesis that violations of expectation enhance children's learning. In four experiments we compared 3- to 6-year-old children's ability to learn novel words in situations that defied versus accorded with their core knowledge of object behavior. In Experiments 1 and 2 we taught children novel words following one of two types of events. One event violated expectations about the spatiotemporal or featural properties of objects (e.g., an object appeared to magically change locations). The other event was almost identical, but did not violate expectations (e.g., an object was visibly moved from one location to another). In both experiments we found that children robustly learned when taught after the surprising event, but not following the expected event. In Experiment 3 we ruled out two alternative explanations for our results. Finally, in Experiment 4, we asked whether surprise affects children's learning in a targeted or a diffuse way. We found that surprise only enhanced children's learning about the entity that had behaved surprisingly, and not about unrelated objects. Together, these experiments show that core knowledge - and violations of expectations generated by core knowledge - shapes new learning.