How do expectations affect infants' perception?

A methodological critique holds that the broad conclusion that expectations shape perception may be stronger than the evidence warrants. Infants’ looking, pupil, and exploration responses are ambiguous: surprise, novelty, attention, arousal, task demands, or difficulty may produce similar outcomes. On this view, expectations likely matter, but many claims about what infants understand remain underdetermined by current paradigms.

• The violation-of-expectation method relies on questionable assumptions about why infants look longer, making strong theoretical inferences speculative.
• Critiques of the paradigm argue that infant behavior has multiple possible interpretations and that assessing knowledge from limited behaviors is difficult.
• A 2022 commentary defended examining the construct validity of violation-of-expectation measures rather than treating longer looking as direct evidence of cognition.
• A recent pupillary-response study reported no clear evidence for a domain-general violation-of-expectation effect in 9- to 10-month-olds.
• Evidence that infants look longer at unexpected events does not by itself establish whether the response reflects perception, surprise, novelty, or another process.

Featured sourceStimulus and expectation-driven novelty independently guide infant looking behaviour: a systematic review and meta-analysisexa.ai5 sourcesView sources