Marc Colomer, Amanda Woodward University of Chicago, Illinois, USA
Most of what infants learn they learn from others. However, not all individuals provide information that is functionally and culturally relevant. Here, we aim at studying how the presentation of events that violate infants’ core knowledge about agency influences selective learning. Previous studies have found that violations of core knowledge enhance learning about objects. However, in social learning, violations of expectations about agency may signal who is not a reliable source of information, rather than an opportunity for learning. To address this hypothesis, we presented 17- and 19-month-olds infants with agents who reached for and grasped a novel object either efficiently (expected action) or inefficiently (unexpected action), and then labeled the object with a novel word. At test, infants saw the target object paired with a new object side by side, and they heard a label that was either consistent or inconsistent with the target’s label. In addition, the agent was paired with a new agent side by side as they explained a story, while only the voice of one of them was played. We measured infants’ visual preferences to explore (1) how they learned about information provided by the agent (label-object association) and (2) how they learned about properties of the agent (agent-voice association). A pilot study suggested that the efficiency of others’ actions may influence infants’ subsequent learning from agents and about agents. Data collection for the main study is ongoing (current N = 85; expected N = 100), and the analysis and main hypothesis were pre-registered (https://osf.io/b3j2m).
