The Role of Surprise in Enhancing Early Learning

描述（由申请人提供）：在几个月大的时候，婴儿对他们周围的世界有了期望。这在很大程度上是通过使用违背期望的观察范式的实验揭示的，该范式利用了婴儿对令人惊讶的事件比不令人惊讶的事件看得更久的发现。例如，婴儿看一个似乎穿过坚固墙壁的球的时间比看一个被墙壁挡住的球的时间长。在许多领域（包括物体、数字和社会代理人）的数百个实验中，婴儿对令人惊讶的事件的观察时间长于对精心匹配的非令人惊讶的事件的观察时间。尽管这些文献在揭示人类生命早期知识的存在方面具有不可估量的价值，但迄今为止还没有研究询问为什么婴儿对令人惊讶的事件看得更久。这个项目的目的是了解这种行为的本质和功能。核心假设是，惊喜的作用是引导年轻学习者将认知资源分配给他们有不正确或不完整预期的事件，从而提高学习效率。第一个系列的实验将确定婴儿对意外事件表现出的惊讶和长时间注视的功能相关性

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): By just a few months of age, infants have expectations about the world around them. In large part this has been revealed by experiments using the violation-of-expectation looking paradigm, which capitalizes on the discovery that infants look longer at events that are surprising than events that are unsurprising. For example, infants look longer at a ball that appears to pass through a solid wall than at a ball that is stopped by the wall. In hundreds of experiments across many domains (including objects, numbers, and social agents), infants look longer at surprising events than at carefully matched non-surprising events. Although this literature has been invaluable in revealing the existence of knowledge early in human life, no research to date has asked why infants look longer at surprising events. The aim of this project is to understand the nature and function of this behavior. The core hypothesis is that surprise acts to guide young learners to allocate cognitive resources to events for which they had an incorrect or incomplete expectation, thereby increasing learning efficiency. The first series of experiments will identify the functional relevance of the surprise and longer looking that infants exhibit to unexpected events - i.e., they will ask whether surprise leads to better learning in infants (Specific Aim 1). In these experiments, infants will have the opportunity to learn new information following either a surprising or a non-surprising (expected) event, and their relative learning success will then be assessed. The prediction is that infants will show enhanced learning about objects or events that generated surprise. The second series of experiments will ask whether surprise also acts to enhance learning in older children in a non-laboratory setting (Specific Aim 2). Preschool- and early school-aged children will be tested in an informal science setting (a science museum) across a variety of tasks, and their learning following surprising versus expected events will be measured. Testing older children under non-laboratory conditions that more closely approximate children's everyday learning opportunities will allow us to assess the generality of surprise-induced enhancement of learning, and to gauge the kinds of learning that do and do not benefit from surprise. Together, the proposed studies will shed light on the processes that lead to effective learning early in life. This research will help to characterize the nature of an everyday behavior that has been documented across hundreds of experiments but whose functional role remains entirely unknown and unexplored. A better understanding of how surprise guides learning has implications for remediating developmental disorders that have been linked to the deficient detection of unexpected events or outcomes, for understanding how attentional deficits lead to decreased learning in children, and for shaping educational practice.