Surprise! Babies Learn More When There's A Surprise

There's the long-held misconception that babies' brains are blank slates. Yet health officials know, now, that infants come equipped with core knowledge pertaining to certain fundamental aspects of the world.

A new study by researchers at John Hopkins University shows something else, too. Babies use these innate smarts to learn new things, as well. For instance, when a surpsing situation may come his or her way, the baby zeroes in on this event to learn something new. Reserarchers found this was particularly true when a baby might see an object behaving differently. He or she would then focus more intently on it, picking up what was different, and then learning more about how it behaved for the next time around.

"Thirty years of research on infant cognition has shown that babies look longer when a situation appears to be surprising rather than a predictable event," said lead study author Aimee Stahl, a PhD candidate at John Hopkins University, via FoxNews.com. "Our question is, why do babies choose to look longer?"

Researchers conducted a series of four experiences throughout a period of three and a half years on 110 preverbal 11-month-old infants in order to observe how they responded to surprising and predictable situations regarding a certain object.

Certain surprising situations involved a ball appearing to pass through a solid wall or an object floating in mid-air, disappearing and then reappearing. Predictable situations were, in turn, the opposite and very simply understood; this might involve an object that was visibly supported by something, etc. And babies were given the option to explore either of the experimental settings.

Researchers found that the babies were typically more likely to explore an object when it was a more surprising toy. 

They they observed the infants' behavior as they interacted with the objected during the surprised situation. After watching the ball pass through a wall, infants banged the object on the table to test out its solidity or observe its mid-air gravity by dropping it on the floor. Yet for those who had picked up the predictable object, they showed no new evidence of learning.

In other words, babies seem to learn about something better when it goes against their belief system.

"Babies can use their sophisticated prior knowledge of the world to guide what they should learn about in the future," Stahl added. "When their expectations are violated, this might signal a special opportunity for them to learn."

"For the moment, we can say that just like adults babies have predictions about the world that they can use to guide their behavior," he concluded. 

More information regarding the findings can be seen via the journal Science.