Developmental Science 10:5 (2007), pp 654– 663
DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-7687.2007.00607.x
PAPER
Blackwell Publishing Ltd
Do you believe in magic? Infants’ social looking during
violations of expectations
Tedra Walden, Geunyoung Kim, Carrie McCoy and Jan Karrass
Department of Psychology and Human Development, Vanderbilt University, USA
Abstract
Young infants tend to look longer at physical events that have unexpected outcomes than those that have expected outcomes,
suggesting that they have knowledge of physical principles such as numerosity and occlusion (Baillargeon & Graber, 1987; Wynn,
1992). Although infants are typically tested in the presence of a caregiver, the social component of violations of expectations
has received little attention. The present study investigated social looking during presumably expected and unexpected cognitive/
perceptual events. Two experiments replicated the results of well-known physical knowledge experiments on addition/subtraction
and occlusion in 6- (Experiments 1 and 2) and 9-month-old infants (Experiment 1), in that infants at both ages looked longer
at unexpected than at expected events. Furthermore, infants at both ages initiated more looks at their caregivers’ faces during
unexpected than expected events. These findings are interpreted as suggesting that infants as young as 6 months of age actively
seek to embed their experiences of unexpected physical/cognitive events in a social context.
Introduction
In 1934, Lev Vygotsky noted that understanding the
interplay of cognition and the social world was critical
in understanding the development of the individual as a
whole. Decades later, there is still much to learn about
the integration of social and cognitive development. The
present study focused on social behaviors when young
infants witnessed events that violated their expectations
about how physical objects behave.
Studies of infants’ nonsocial reactions to violations of
their expectations regarding cognitive/perceptual phenomena
have suggested that infants possess some understanding
of physical events such as occlusion, containment, and
support early in the first year of life. Baillargeon and
Graber (1987) and Wynn (1992) have shown that infants
look longer at unexpected events than at expected
events, indicating that by 6 months of age infants have
some knowledge of physical principles such as occlusion
and numerosity. Both Baillargeon and Graber and Wynn
used a violation of expectation (VOE) method, which
compares infants’ visual attention to displays of physical
objects and events as they usually occur (expected or
possible events) to ‘tricks’ in which impossible physical
events appear to occur (unexpected because they violate
physical principles, although Luo and Baillargeon (2005)
studied ordinary possible events that were inconsistent
with infants’ limited knowledge). It is based on infants’
tendency to look longer at events that they find novel or
surprising (Baillargeon, Spelke & Wasserman, 1985),
which has been linked theoretically to increases in alertness
and ‘orientational-investigative activity’ (Berlyne, 1960,
1978; Berlyne & Borsa, 1968; Sokolov, Nezlina, Polyanskii
& Evtikhin, 2002). Baillargeon (2004) used the term
‘surprise’ to indicate the ‘state of heightened interest or
attention induced by an expectation violation’ (p. 392),
although others have used arousal- or emotion-based
descriptions of the experience of viewing impossible events
appear to occur (e.g. Camras, Meng, Ujlie, Dharamsi,
Miyake, Oster, Wang, Cruz, Murdoch & Campos, 2002).
VOE methods have been criticized because of possible
confounding variables that may account for increased
looking at unexpected events (e.g. Cohen & Marks, 2002,
who presented data from three numeriosity experiments
with 5-month-old infants that supported an explanation
for addition/subtraction focusing on preferences for
familiarity and larger numbers of objects, arguably less
developmentally advanced mechanisms). Sorting out
competing explanations for increased looking at the
unexpected events is important for understanding infants’
Address for correspondence: Tedra Walden, GPC 512, Department of Psychology and Human Development, Vanderbilt University, 230 Appleton
Place, Nashville, TN 37203, USA; e-mail: tedra.walden@vanderbilt.edu
© 2007 The Authors. Journal compilation © 2007 Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and
350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.
Infant social looking
behavior following the events, but the present studies
focused on the simpler question of whether infants
engage in social behavior following the presumably
unexpected events in VOE. Although infants are typically
tested in the presence of a caregiver, possible social
components of violations of expectations have received
little attention (cf. Camras et al., 2002). We reasoned
that infants may be aroused by violations of their expectations, and that this arousal occurs in a social context
in which they seek to resolve their uncertainty or share
their experience.
Studies of infant social referencing have shown that
1-year-old infants faced with novel or ambiguous events
(e.g. unusual robots) are likely to visually reference the
emotional expressions of others and use these expressions
to guide their own behavior toward the events (e.g.
Sorce, Emde, Campos & Klinnert, 1985). For example,
12-month-old infants are more likely to approach and
play with a toy associated with positive emotional
messages than with a toy associated with fearful messages.
Social referencing is said to provide information about
how to interpret the meaning of events and is thought to
be developmentally adaptive because, as is characteristic
of social learning strategies, it capitalizes on the experiences
of others and does not require first-hand experience with
uncommon, unexpected, or potentially dangerous events
(Feinman, Roberts, Hsieh, Sawyer & Swanson, 1992).
There has been little empirical work specifying conditions
under which infants engage in social referencing (cf.
Sorce et al., 1985); however, most theoretical accounts
emphasize novelty or ambiguity (Feinman et al., 1992).
Stenberg (2003) reported that 1-year-old infants look at
other persons more in ambiguous situations than in
unambiguous situations. Most experiments have used
arousing stimuli that infants might perceive as dangerous
or unpleasant (e.g. motorized robots, approach of strangers,
crossing an apparent drop-off). Studies of social referencing embed these stimuli in a social and emotional
context; caregivers are positioned within view and
respond with emotional messages when the infants look
toward them (e.g. Walden & Ogan, 1988).
Social referencing has been reliably observed in
infants as young as 12 months of age, so this is generally
considered the age of onset (cf. Striano, Vaish & Benigno,
in press). Walden and Ogan (1988) found evidence of
social referencing in 10–12-month-old infants but not
younger infants. They also found selectivity in social
looking such that, especially for older infants, looks
toward caregivers’ faces differed when caregivers expressed
positive and negative emotion, whereas looks toward
caregivers’ bodies did not differ. It has been difficult to
investigate social referencing in younger infants because
current methods require that infants are mobile (and
© 2007 The Authors. Journal compilation © 2007 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.
655
able to approach or avoid stimuli), that they understand
the social-emotional messages about the event (as well as
understanding that the messages refer to the event), and
that they can regulate their responses accordingly. This
requires coordination of cognitive, social, and motor
behavior. However, components of social referencing,
such as joint attention and social looking, begin to
develop earlier in the first year of life (e.g. Butterworth
& Jarrett, 1991; Carpenter, Nagell & Tomasello, 1998).
For example, Striano and Rochat (2000) showed that 10month-old infants regulate their social looking following
toy dog-barking events in response to variations in the
availability of their social partner for interaction by
looking more toward an attentive partner than one who
is looking away. Another relevant development during
the first year is joint attention between infants and other
people regarding objects or events (e.g. Carpenter et al.,
1998), a skill that Tomasello (1995) and Hobson (2002)
described as two minds aware that they are focusing on
the same topic. For example, Striano and Stahl (2005)
reported that infants as young as 3 months show a
sensitivity in social looking to triadic attention involving
an adult stranger.
Violations of cognitive expectations may set the stage
for infants to engage in social referencing behaviors, or
at least social looking, because the events may be novel
or ambiguous. Violations of expectations differ from
typical social referencing stimuli in that they involve
interpretations of physical events, rather than potential
danger or unpleasantness. Whether social behaviors,
such as social looks, accompany infants’ reactions to
these events has not been thoroughly investigated.
Camras and colleagues (2002) studied emotional expressions of 11-month-old infants during a covert toy-switch
event, which they argued was expectancy violating (see
also Baillargeon, 2004). Despite the difficulty in coding
surprise in infants and the fact that surprise expressions
are infrequent during violation of expectancy procedures
(Camras et al., 2002; Hiatt, Campos & Emde, 1979),
they found that expressions of surprise and interest (but
not social looking) were more frequent during unexpected
than expected events. In the present study we focused on
occurrences of social looking (infant initiated looks at
others) that accompany infants’ responses to presumably
expected and unexpected physical events.
In sum, 1-year-old infants are likely to look to other
persons during times of uncertainty. In addition, infants
use others’ reactions to events as information guiding
their own interpretation of events. Components of social
referencing, such as social looking, emerge earlier than
12 months but we do not know whether social looking
is used in conditions of novelty or uncertainty for young
infants, especially for events that are nonsocial in nature
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Tedra Walden et al.
and do not involve emotional elements such as danger,
disgust, or happiness. Studying infants’ social looking
during violations of their expectations about physical
events allows us to address some of these questions. It
also might be a sensitive measure of infants’ reactions to
uncertainty at younger ages than is typically observed.
We conducted two experiments using well-known
tasks of young infants’ knowledge of numerosity and
occlusion (Baillargeon & Graber, 1987; Simon, Hespos
& Rochat, 1995; Wynn, 1992). Unlike studies of infant
social referencing, caregivers were nonresponsive to
infant looks; therefore we did not address the question
of how infants might have used social information or
emotion to interpret the events. Instead, we focused on
infant social looks to caregivers. We expected that social
looking would occur during unexpected physical events.
Because previous social referencing research has emphasized the importance of infants’ looks at parents’ faces,
rather than other parts of the body, we examined them
separately. We were especially interested in infants’ looks
toward their caregivers’ faces, since faces have been
considered key in providing social information, and
studies of social referencing in 1-year-old infants have
suggested that looks to the face are associated with
searches for social information, whereas body looks are
not (e.g. being more often associated with security- or
comfort-seeking; see Walden & Ogan, 1988, for discussion
of the meaning of looks at faces and nonface looks).
Experiment 1
Six- and 9-month old infants’ social looking was compared
during unexpected and expected events involving numerosity, using methods reported in Wynn (1992) and
Simon et al. (1995). We predicted an age by event
interaction such that older infants would engage in more
social looking during unexpected than expected events,
with younger infants engaging in little social looking
under either condition; furthermore, we expected this
effect to be primarily accounted for by looks to caregivers’
faces rather than nonface looks.
Method
Participants
Twenty-five 6- and 26 9-month-old infants were recruited
through phone calls from birth records available from
the State of Tennessee. Three participated with fathers;
the remainder with mothers. The sample was predominantly
Caucasian and middle class. Data from nine 6-month-old
(three had experimental errors, three were terminated
© 2007 The Authors. Journal compilation © 2007 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.
early, one was fussy, one was inattentive, and one mother
failed to follow instructions) and 10 9-month-old infants
(three had experimental errors, four were terminated
early, one was fussy, one was inattentive, and one mother
failed to follow instructions) were removed. The final
sample included 16 6- (M = 5.7 months of age, range
5;15 to 6;14) and 16 9-month-old infants (M = 9.0
months of age, range 8;15 to 9;14). No sex differences
were found in any analysis.
Procedure
We followed procedures reported in Wynn (1992) and
Simon et al. (1995). Children sat on their parents’ laps
at a viewing distance of one meter away from a puppet
stage (about 100 cm high, 130 cm wide, and 70 cm deep)
with an opening 36 cm high and 90 cm wide in the
center. A rotating screen 50 cm wide and 30 cm high was
positioned in the center of the stage. A large screen was
lowered to cover the opening between the infants and
the stage. There were flaps cut on the sides of the stage
to allow experimenters to manipulate objects.
The experiment contained four events. First, during
baseline events, each infant saw both a 15-cm high single
Elmo puppet and two Elmo puppets (twice each, with order
counterbalanced). There was no significant difference in
looking at one vs. two puppets during baseline.
Second, pre-test events acquainted infants with movements of the experimenter’s hand and rotating screen
and were identical to test events but did not include
Elmos. Specifically, infants saw an empty stage, then the
screen rotated up, the experimenter’s hand reached
behind the screen and came out empty, and finally the
screen rotated down.
Following four pre-test events, six test trials occurred.
The test events were of two types: expected and unexpected,
and two categories: addition and subtraction. In the
addition condition, infants first saw a single Elmo on
stage. After 5 sec of infant gaze fixation, the rotating
screen raised and occluded the object. Then the experimenter’s hand emerged from the flap on the side of the
stage, holding an additional Elmo puppet. She slowly
moved the object behind the occluder and showed the
empty hand to infants. Immediately following, the
occluder rotated down to reveal one (Unexpected: 1 + 1
= 1) or two Elmos (Expected: 1 + 1 = 2) on the stage.
Orders of stimulus presentation were counterbalanced,
and no order effect was found in any subsequent analyses.
The subtraction condition was similar to the addition
condition, except that infants first saw two Elmos on stage.
The experimenter showed the empty hand after the rotating
screen raised, moved the hand behind the screen, and took
one of the objects. Again, infants saw either one (Expected:
Infant social looking
657
Figure 1 Test events for Experiment 1.
2 – 1 = 1) or two puppets (Unexpected: 2 – 1 = 2) when
the rotating screen lowered (see Figure 1). There were three
expected and three unexpected events for each infant
(addition/subtraction randomly assigned across infants).
A second observer who was unaware of the events on
stage or the experimental condition watched a live video
of the infant’s face from a separate room. When the
infant looked away from the stage for 2 consecutive sec,
she signaled the main experimenter to lower the large
screen between infants and the stage to end the trial.
Caregivers closed their eyes and did not interact with the
child during the study.
and upward, involving head and chin movement were
counted as a look toward face. Looks to the side alone
or looks down were counted as a look toward body (see
Walden & Ogan, 1988, for further details). All social
looks were actively initiated by the infants, and caregivers
did not respond to any looks. To control for differences
in trial duration, rates of each type of social look
(number of looks/trial time in sec) were used for analyses.
Two observers blind to trial condition coded infants’
behaviors. Interobserver agreement for duration of infants’
looks at the stimuli was .89. Intraclass correlations were
.99 for face looks, and .98 for nonface looks.
Measures
Results and discussion
Two types of infant looking behaviors were coded from
videotape by observers who were unaware of experimental
condition: duration of looking at the stimuli during each
event, a typical measure of interest or discrimination
(see Simon et al., 1995), and number of infant looks
toward the caregiver, a typical measure of social
referencing. Duration of social looking was not used
because social looks longer than 2 sec ended a trial and
truncated coding the duration of these looks.
In addition, infant social looks were differentiated
into two types: looks that would have brought the
caregiver’s face into focal view and nonface looks
directed at the caregiver’s body. Only looks to the side
First, duration of looking at expected and unexpected
events was compared. Repeated measures analysis of
variance with two within-subject factors, trial (6 presentations) and type of event (2: expected or unexpected),
and one between-subject factor, age (2), indicated that
both 6- and 9-month old infants looked at the stimulus
longer during the unexpected events (1 + 1 = 1 or 2 – 1
= 2; F(1, 30) = 6.74, p < .05, partial η2 = .18; see Table 1).
Individuals showed the same pattern, with 12 of 16
infants in each age group looking longer at unexpected
events. These findings replicated previous findings
reported by Wynn (1992) and Simon et al. (1995) and
showed that infants discriminated the events.
© 2007 The Authors. Journal compilation © 2007 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.
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Tedra Walden et al.
Table 1 Means (Standard Deviations) for looks to targets and
social looks Experiment 1
Condition
Experiment duration (sec)
6 months
9 months
Target looks (duration in sec)
6 months
9 months
Frequency of social looks at faces
6 months
9 months
Frequency of nonface social looks
6 months
9 months
Rate of social looks at facea
6 months
9 months
Rate of nonface social looksa
6 months
9 months
Expected
events
Unexpected
events
36.31 (14.74)
35.43 (9.66)
45.61 (21.03)
40.25 (21.53)
25.21 (11.33)
24.74 (6.49)
34.19 (16.57)
29.13 (17.22)
1.06 (1.43)
.75 (1.00)
1.56 (2.09)
1.19 (1.11)
1.63 (1.86)
2.00 (1.90)
1.56 (1.26)
2.31 (1.82)
.03 (.04)
.02 (.03)
.04 (.06)
.04 (.05)
.04 (.05)
.06 (.05)
.04 (.05)
.07 (.08)
Figure 2 Experiment 1: Infants’ looks to caregivers during
expected and unexpected events.
Note: a Due to unequal duration of trials across infants, all analyses of social
looks were based on rates (frequency/trial duration).
Twenty-seven of the 32 participants engaged in some
type of social looking, with 25 engaging in nonface
looking and 20 looking toward caregivers’ faces. Thirteen
of 16 6-month-old and 14 of 16 9-month-old infants
initiated social looks, with 63% (17/27) of those engaging
in both face and nonface looking toward caregivers.
Overall ANOVA for social looks with 2 within- (type
of event, type of social look) and one between-subject
factors (age) showed a significant main effect for the type
of social look, F(1, 30) = 5.71, p < .05, partial η2 = .16, in
that infants tended to look at non-face areas more than
face areas. A marginally significant main effect for the
type of event, F(1, 30) = 3.15, p = .08, partial η2 = .10,
was found, in that infants looked at caregivers more
during unexpected events than during expected events.
In this omnibus analysis, the interaction between type of
event and type of social look was not significant,
F(1, 30) = .30, ns (see Figure 2).
Since looks toward caregivers’ faces was of special
interest for the present study, looks to face and those
toward body parts were separately analyzed (preplanned
comparisons). For looks toward faces, infants at both
ages looked at a higher rate at their caregivers’ faces
during unexpected than expected events, F(1, 30) = 4.23,
p < .05, partial η2 = .12. A separate planned comparison
at 6 and 9 months tested whether the effect held at each
age. Due to the loss of statistical power by splitting the
data, it did not reach significance. However, both
younger (1.57 vs. 1.063) and older (1.19 vs. .75) infants
© 2007 The Authors. Journal compilation © 2007 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.
Figure 3 Experiment 1: Infants’ face and nonface looks to
caregivers.
* p < .05 for expected vs. unexpected.
tended to look at caregivers’ faces more often during
unexpected events (see Figure 3). There was no significant
interaction with age.
There was no difference in nonface looking for
expected and unexpected events, F(1, 30) = 1.45, ns. This
pattern indicates that infants were not simply ‘looking
around’ more during the unexpected events, but focused
selectively on the target stimulus or caregivers’ faces.
The relations among social looks, nonsocial looks,
and trial time were further examined. First, correlations
between looks toward target and social looks indicated
that duration of looks to target was negatively correlated
with social looks only during unexpected events, r = .42,
p < .05 for looks to face, r = −.52, p < .01 for nonface
looks. The correlations were not significant during
expected events, r = −.22, ns for looks to face, r = −.13,
ns, for nonface looks, suggesting that infants were more
systematically coordinating their target looking with
social looks during unexpected events. Second, the number
Infant social looking
of trials ended by social looks accounted for about 30%
of all trials. Specifically, an average of 1.31 trials of
younger and 2.19 trials of older infants out of six test
trials were terminated because the infants were involved
in social looking. The age difference was not statistically
significant, t(30) = 1.20, ns.
Results of Experiment 1 are consistent with Simon et al.
(1995) and Wynn (1992), showing longer looking at targets
during unexpected events. In addition, infants used a social
strategy (social looks) when they encountered cognitive/
perceptual ambiguity. There were no age differences.
Experiment 2
To replicate and extend the results of Experiment 1, a
new task was identified for a group of 6-month-old
infants. Baillargeon and Graber’s (1987) violationof-expectation task involving infants’ expectations about
the height of objects behind occluders was used. Based
on the results of Experiment 1, we predicted that infants
would look toward caregivers’ faces, especially during
unexpected events.
Method
Participants
Twenty 6-month-old infants and their mothers (19) or
full-time babysitters (1) were recruited through phone
calls from state birth records. Half were male. The
sample was predominantly Caucasian and middle class.
Four infants were excluded (two had experimental
errors, and two caregivers failed to follow instructions).
The final sample included 16 infants (M = 6.1 mos,
range 5;16 to 6;14).
Procedure
Children sat on their caregivers’ laps facing the same
puppet stage used for the Study 1, with the caregiver’s
body and chair angled 45 degrees either to the left or
right of the center of the stage (counterbalanced). This
positioning allowed the infant to look at his or her
caregiver more easily, if desired. Caregivers closed their
eyes and did not interact with the child.
An occlusion task tested 6-month-old infants’ expectations about tall (27 cm) and short (13 cm) toy carrots
that passed behind a screen following the method
described in Baillargeon and DeVos (1991). The carrots
were made of orange plush fur and each had two green
leaves, black thread eyes, and a black thread mouth.
Each carrot was sewn to an L-bracket carrier used to
© 2007 The Authors. Journal compilation © 2007 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.
659
slide the carrots across the stage out of view of the infant.
The rotating screen used in Study 1 was replaced with two
freestanding screens, one full occluder used for pre-test
events and one screen with a cutout used for test trials.
Each infant saw four pre-test events, which alternated
between short and tall carrots that moved across the
stage (left to right from the infant’s view) and passed
behind a full occluder (no cutout). The pre-test events
demonstrated the carrots and their trajectories and
made it possible to determine if the infants preferred
looking at the short or tall carrot (test of the difference
was F(1, 15) = .56, ns).
After the pre-test trials, each infant viewed six test
events, which alternated between expected (short carrot
passed behind a short occluder unseen) and unexpected
events (tall carrot passed behind a short occluder
unseen) or the reverse (see Figure 4). The test events
were identical to the pre-test events, except that the
cutout screen was used. A short and a tall carrot
traversed the puppet stage and passed behind a screen
with a 20-cm × 15-cm cutout in the top half, a height
that revealed the tall but not the short carrot as it passed
behind. It is expected that the short carrot could pass
behind the occluder unseen (expected event), but when
the tall carrot passed behind the occluder unseen, it was
unexpected (unexpected event). In order to produce the
illusion, two carrots of each size were actually used, one
which started moving across the stage and passed behind
the tall portion of the near side of the screen and a
second carrot that had been hidden behind the screen
and appeared from behind the tall portion of the far side
of the screen. Each event took approximately 12 sec and
the cycle was repeated until the signaled end of the trial
(infant looked away from stage for at least 2 sec). A
metronome beat assisted the experimenter in timing the
events to appear as one continuous movement across the
stage. Each trial continued until the infant looked away
from the stage for 2 consecutive sec, as judged by an
observer blind to experimental condition. There were three
expected and three unexpected events for each infant.
Measures
Measures are as described in Experiment 1. Interobserver
agreement was .94 for duration of infants’ looks at the
stimuli, with intraclass correlations of .99 for both face
and nonface looks.
Results and discussion
Results replicated findings from previous studies, with
infants looking longer at unexpected than expected
events, F(1, 15) = 6.92, p < .05, partial η2 = .32. Individuals
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Figure 4
Test events for Experiment 2.
showed the same pattern, with 12 of 16 infants looking
longer at the unexpected events. These findings are
consistent with Baillargeon and Graber (1987) and
Baillargeon and DeVos (1991) and support the position
that the unexpected events elicited special interest.
Fifteen of 16 participants engaged in some type of
social looking, with 13 engaging in nonface looking and
nine engaging in face looking. Infants were separated
into two groups: those who looked at the target more
during unexpected events and those who did not. A
repeated measures ANOVA did not show a significant
interaction of event (expected vs. unexpected) and targetlook group on the number of social looks toward the
caregiver’s face, F(1, 15) = 2.08, p = .17 (see Table 2).
As in Experiment 1, looks toward the caregiver’s face
were analyzed separately. A repeated measures ANOVA
indicated that the infants were more likely to reference
their caregivers’ faces during unexpected events than
expected events; mean rates per sec .017 and .009,
respectively; F(1, 15) = 5.28, p < .05, partial η2 = .26 (see
Table 2 and Figure 5). However, nonface looks toward
the caregiver did not differ for expected and unexpected
events, F(1, 15) = .39, ns.
The results of Experiment 2 replicated the results of
Experiment 1, using a new task with 6-month-old infants.
The effects were replicated even though the new task
elicited higher overall durations of target looks and
lower rates of social looks; thus, task influenced amount
of looking but the effects of unexpected events on social
and target looks remained. Infants were more likely to
look at caregivers’ faces during unexpected than
expected events, whereas nonface looks did not differ.
Findings from the two experiments suggest that social
looking toward caregivers’ faces is a reliable phenomenon
for young infants faced with the unexpected events in
the VOE procedure.
© 2007 The Authors. Journal compilation © 2007 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.
Table 2 Means (Standard Deviations) for looks to targets and
social looks Experiment 2
Condition
Expected
events
Experiment duration (sec)
Duration of target looks (sec)
Frequency of social looks at faces
Frequency of nonface social looks
Rate of social looks at facesa
Rate of nonface social looksa
71.78
60.73
.81
1.93
.01
.03
(28.78)
(26.21)
(1.60)
(2.35)
(.02)
(.03)
Unexpected
events
89.76
77.76
1.56
1.88
.02
.02
(23.34)
(21.66)
(1.96)
(1.71)
(.02)
(.02)
Note: a Due to unequal trial durations across infants, all analyses of social looks
were based on rates (frequency/trial duration).
Figure 5 Experiment 2: Infants’ face and nonface looks to
caregivers.
* p < .05 for expected vs. unexpected.
General discussion
In her 2000 address to the APA for her Award for
Distinguished Scientific Contributions, Elizabeth Spelke
Infant social looking
asked, ‘How do humans develop and deploy complex,
species-specific and culture-specific cognitive skills such
as reading, mathematics, mapmaking, myriad forms of
tool use, and reasoning about the physical and social
world?’ She argued that we should broaden our search for
insights into the development of these skills. Similarly, in
1991 Baillargeon and DeVos noted that the richness and
sophistication of young infants’ knowledge and abilities
about the physical world raises important questions
about the origins and development of this world knowledge.
The two studies described here broaden that search to
include social interactional contributions to understanding
physical concepts.
The present studies replicated findings of two well-known
phenomena in infant cognitive development, one involving
numerosity and one involving occlusion, showing that
infants looked longer at events that are presumed to
violate their expectations about how physical objects
behave. In both experiments, infants also initiated more
social looks to their caregivers when faced with unexpected
physical events than when the events were expected.
Although the two tasks elicited different rates of target
and social looks, unexpected events elicited more of both
types of looks in both experiments. These results suggest
that social strategies are in the repertoire of infants and
that referring to others may be a part of infants’ experience
of events in the physical world.
We expected that we might find social looking among
9-month-old infants, even though the tasks were cognitive and relatively nonsocial. We found that both 6- and
9-month-old infants actively engaged the social environment following violations of expectations. Infants sat on
their motionless and unresponsive caregivers’ laps. To
turn around and look back toward them and bring
them into focal view (peripheral looks were not coded),
especially upward at their faces, was no small task for
these young infants (try it yourself!). That social looks
occurred at all under these conditions speaks to the
depth of the infants’ motivation to look at their caregivers.
These conditions probably reduced the amount of social
looking; as well as resulting in some infants’ looks that
may have been intended toward the caregiver’s face
being directed below the face, and thus coded as nonface
looks and reducing the discriminant power of the two
categories of looks.
Because of the low rate of social looking in the
present studies, we were unable to examine trial-by-trial
effects, which may be important for understanding the
function of social looking and in understanding what
individual children do when faced with unexpected physical
events. Use of an eye-tracker in future studies may help
identify sequences of looking. In the present studies, we
attempted to replicate published procedures as exactly as
© 2007 The Authors. Journal compilation © 2007 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.
661
possible, but future studies should use procedures that
make it easier for infants to look at their parents (and
their faces), perhaps by positioning the caregiver to the
side of the infant. In addition, responsive caregivers who
have their eyes open might elicit higher rates of social
looking, especially for infants in the age range (9 months)
of the older infants in the present Experiment 1 (Striano
& Rochat, 2000). Variations in the responsiveness of
social partners will help us to understand the function
of infants’ social looks. Finally, longer fixed-length trials
may capture more infant social (and other) behavior
than the procedures used in the current studies, in which
looks away from the target lasting longer than 2 sec
terminated the trials. Infant target looks and social
looks must be interpreted in the context of a fuller consideration of the many ways that infants may behave in
response to events that violate their expectations.
Infants’ social looking was selective, in that they
differentially looked at their caregivers’ faces following
the unexpected events. Although we cannot determine
the function of looks in these studies, for older infants
(i.e. 12–24 months) in social referencing situations,
looks at faces have been related to information seeking,
whereas nonface looks are related to comfort-seeking
responses (Walden & Kim, 2005; Walden & Ogan,
1988). Berlyne (1960) cited novelty, ‘surprisingness’, and
uncertainty as factors that create cognitive conflict,
motivating a search for information. If perception involves
an active process of detecting and making sense of information (e.g. Gibson & Spelke, 1983), then social sources
can be useful and efficient in interpreting events and may
contribute to knowledge about those events.
Looks at caregivers’ faces might also reflect affect-sharing
attempts. For example, infants may have felt surprised
by the unexpected events and wanted to share that experience (or even to share a positive experience of liking or
preference, see Cohen & Marks, 2002). Or, infants may
have learned an association between the occurrence of
an arousing or surprising event and a caregiver response
and they turned to the caregiver in anticipation of a
response. Infants may also have been interested in knowing
whether the caregiver was paying attention to the same
interesting event (joint or coordinated attention; e.g.
Tomasello, 1995). An important task for future research
will be sorting out which of these processes (or which
combination) motivates social looking.
We have taken an admittedly cognitively rich interpretation of infant behavior. Increased looking at unexpected
events was interpreted as reflecting increased interest as
a result of violations of infants’ expectations, and social
looking was suggested to be a strategy invoked to help
resolve uncertainty. Cohen and Marks (2002) and Bogartz
and colleagues (Bogartz, Shinsky & Speaker, 1997) offered
662
Tedra Walden et al.
competing explanations for behavior in VOE procedures,
focusing on preferences (a positive reaction) for familiarity
and numerosity. A concern for numerosity may apply to
our first experiment (though we controlled this), but the
second experiment did not include numerosity; however,
familiarity may have been produced by the baseline
events in both experiments. Therefore, future work
should include other VOE tasks. Furthermore, infants in
the present studies were older and should be less influenced by these factors (Baillargeon, 2004; Cohen &
Marks, 2002). Finally, if mildly positive experiences such
as preferences prompt infant social looking, then the
range of situations in which infants might initiate social
interaction is expanded. Future studies can incorporate
these factors in research designs to understand their
impact and to take them into account in our theories of
social cognitive development. That is, social looking that
is motivated by a desire to share positive experiences
may reflect different processes than motives to resolve
uncertainty. Future studies might incorporate variations
in tasks and in the usefulness of social information
in order to identify factors that might encourage (or
discourage) social looking (e.g. Kim & Walden, 2006).
The present study was not a study of social referencing,
in that no caregiver–child communication occurred and
there is no test of whether infants might have been influenced by communications received during unexpected
events (these infants received no responses from their
caregivers at all, which might be expected to decrease the
rate of social looking). Yet, social referencing is one
likely explanation for the present results, suggesting that
more sensitive methods might identify social referencing
at earlier ages than has been typically found and in
situations that are less social and more cognitive.
The findings of the present study offer a possible
alternative interpretation of infants’ looks away from the
events in violation-of-expectation experiments. These
looks have been interpreted as reflecting loss of interest
or boredom for expected events (Baillargeon, 1999). The
present findings suggest that at least some of the looks
away from the display are attempts to engage the social
environment, rather than reflecting simply loss of interest.
Such social looks, which terminated a trial when they
lasted 2 sec or more (30% of trials in Experiment 1 and
20% in Experiment 2), may have truncated, thus underestimated, duration of looking at unexpected events, as
well as estimates of social looking. The occurrence of
social looks also suggests that the testing situations used
to study violations of cognitive/perceptual expectations
may have a larger social component than previously
appreciated.
Finally, it is noteworthy that infants actively initiated looks
at their caregivers during two different events – violations
© 2007 The Authors. Journal compilation © 2007 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.
of expectations about numerosity and occlusion. The two
tasks have been said to reside in different ‘core knowledge systems’ that are domain specific, task specific,
and operate independently from other systems (Spelke,
2000). The findings of the present study suggest that
social interaction may be a strategy for dealing with
uncertainty in a variety of domains. That is, attempts to
engage the social world may be an early strategy at the
service of many cognitive, perceptual and social understandings. Gibson and Spelke (1983) noted that infants
are ‘richly endowed with the means of finding out about
the environment’ and the present studies suggest that
involving other persons may be one such means. The
finding that infants actively sought to embed their
experiences of cognitively puzzling events in a social
context expands our view of how infants experience
these events in the world and suggests the possibility of
new explanatory mechanisms.
Acknowledgements
We are indebted to Susan Hespos, who provided videotapes
of the procedure in Experiment 1 and facilities and
assistance for Experiment 2 (McCoy’s undergraduate
Honors thesis under the direction of Walden), and to
Daniel Ashmead for comments on the manuscript. Many
thanks to the parents and infants from the Nashville area
who participated. Portions of the paper were presented at
the 2004 ICIS meeting in Chicago, IL.
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Received: 17 April 2006
Accepted: 30 August 2006