The Role of Surprise in Enhancing Early Learning

描述（由申请人提供）：在几个月大的时候，婴儿对周围的世界有了期望。这在很大程度上是由使用违反期望的观察范式的实验所揭示的，该范式利用了婴儿对令人惊讶的事件的观察时间长于对不令人惊讶的事件的观察时间的发现。例如，婴儿看一个穿过实心墙的球的时间比看一个被墙挡住的球的时间长。在许多领域（包括物体、数字和社会代理）的数百个实验中，婴儿看令人惊讶的事件的时间比仔细匹配的非惊讶事件要长。虽然这些文献在揭示人类生命早期知识的存在方面非常宝贵，但迄今为止还没有研究问过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性质和功能。其核心假设是，惊讶行为引导幼儿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。第一系列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-即，他们 我会问惊喜是否会导致婴儿更好的学习（具体目标1）。在这些实验中，婴儿将有机会学习新的信息后，无论是令人惊讶的或不令人惊讶的（预期）事件，他们的相对学习成功，然后将被评估。预测是，婴儿将表现出对产生惊喜的物体或事件的增强学习。第二个系列的实验将询问在非实验室环境中，惊喜是否也能增强年龄较大的儿童的学习能力（具体目标2）。学龄前和学龄前儿童将在非正式的科学环境（科学博物馆）中进行各种任务的测试，并测量他们在意外事件与预期事件之后的学习情况。在非实验室条件下对年龄较大的儿童进行测试，更接近儿童的日常学习机会，这将使我们能够评估意外引起的学习增强的普遍性，并衡量哪些学习类型会受益于意外，哪些不会受益于意外。总之，拟议的研究将揭示导致生命早期有效学习的过程。这项研究将有助于描述日常生活的性质， 这种行为已经在数百个实验中被记录下来，但其功能作用仍然完全未知和未被探索。更好地理解惊喜如何引导学习，对于补救与意外事件或结果检测不足有关的发育障碍，理解注意力缺陷如何导致儿童学习减少，以及塑造教育实践具有重要意义。

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.