Stable individual differences in infants' responses to violations of intuitive physics.

ABSTRACT: 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, interpreting them is challenging because infants' responses are highly variable. This variability has been treated as an unavoidable nuisance inherent to infant research. Here we asked whether the variability contains signal in addition to noise: namely, whether some infants show consistently stronger responses to expectancy violations than others. Infants watched two unrelated physical events 6 mo apart; these events culminated in either an impossible or an expected outcome. We found that infants who exhibited the strongest looking response to an impossible event at 11 mo also exhibited the strongest response to

SUBMITTER: Perez J 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8271639 | biostudies-literature | 2021 Jul

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature