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 …

Research on cognitive development has revealed that even the youngest minds detect and
respond to events that adults find surprising. These surprise responses suggest that infants …

Infants look longer and explore more following violations-of-expectation, but the reasons for
these surprise-induced behaviors are unclear. One possibility is that expectancy violations …

Sensitivity to the predictability of the environment supports young children's learning in many
domains [1, 2], including language [3–6]; perception [7, 8]; and the processing of objects …

Infants look at physically impossible events longer than at physically possible events, and at
improbable events longer than at probable events. Such behaviors are generally interpreted …

Given the overwhelming quantity of information available from the environment, how do
young learners know what to learn about and what to ignore? We found that 11-month-old …

Infants generate basic expectations about their physical and social environment. This early
knowledge allows them to identify opportunities for learning, preferring to explore and learn …

Infants look longer at impossible or unlikely events than at possible events. While these
responses to expectancy violations have been critical for understanding early cognition …

During exploration, young children often show an intuitive sensitivity to uncertainty, despite
their strong tendency towards overconfidence in their explicit judgments. Here, we examine …

For over 35 years, the violation-of-expectation paradigm has been used to study the
development of expectations in the first 3 years of life. A wide range of expectations has …