New research suggests babies learn best when they experience an element of surprise.
The recent findings show that babies learn by "leveraging" the base information they are born with, Johns Hopkins University reported. When an object behaves differently than a baby would expect it to, it provides new insight into the world.
"For young learners, the world is an incredibly complex place filled with dynamic stimuli. How do learners know what to focus on and learn more about, and what to ignore? Our research suggests that infants use what they already know about the world to form predictions. When these predictions are shown to be wrong, infants use this as a special opportunity for learning," said Lisa Feigenson, a professor of psychological and brain sciences in the university's Krieger School of Arts and Sciences. "When babies are surprised, they learn much better, as though they are taking the occasion to try to figure something out about their world."
To make their findings, the researchers looked at preverbal 11-month-old babies to see if they would seek out more information about an object that behaved unexpectedly. They showed the babies both surprising and predictable situations regarding an object. For example, one group of babies saw a ball roll down a slide and get stopped by a wall, and another saw the ball "magically" pass through the wall. The team found the "surprise" helped the babies learn and prompted them to seek out more information about the object.
"The infants' behaviors are not merely reflexive responses to the novelty of surprising outcomes, but instead reflect deeper attempts to learn about aspects of the world that failed to accord with expectations," said Aimee E. Stahl, the paper's lead author and a doctoral student in psychological and brain sciences. "Infants are not only equipped with core knowledge about fundamental aspects of the world, but from early in their lives, they harness this knowledge to empower new learning."
The findings were published in a recent edition of the journal Science.
