Infants' Domain-General Responses to Expectancy Violations

Area of Science:

• Developmental Psychology
• Cognitive Science
• Neuroscience

Background:

• Theories of modularity suggest specialized cognitive systems process distinct inputs from early development.
• Infants exhibit differential expectations for physical objects versus social agents, implying domain-specific processing.
• The independent functioning of these specialized systems in early behavioral responses remains underexplored.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate whether infants' responses to physical and social expectancy violations are driven by independent systems.
• To examine individual differences in infants' responses across physical and social domains.
• To explore the relationship between early surprise responses and later curiosity.

Main Methods:

• Tested 14- to 27-month-old infants with 16 events violating expectations in object physics or social behavior domains.
• Analyzed individual differences in visual interest towards surprising versus expected events.
• Utilized latent factor analysis to model responses across physical and social domains.

Main Results:

• Infants' surprise responses to expectancy violations were better explained by a single latent factor than separate domain-specific factors.
• The domain-generality of surprise responses increased with age.
• Individual differences in cross-domain surprise predicted later curiosity.

Conclusions:

• Infants' responses to expectancy violations in both physical and social domains recruit a domain-general prediction error mechanism.
• The domain-general nature of prediction error processing strengthens with age.
• Early individual differences in prediction error detection link to later curiosity and exploration.