Department of Psychology, The College of New Jersey.
Department of Psychological & Brain Sciences, Johns Hopkins University.
Top Cogn Sci. 2019 Jan;11(1):136-153. doi: 10.1111/tops.12389. Epub 2018 Oct 15.
Research on cognitive development has revealed that even the youngest minds detect and respond to events that adults find surprising. These surprise responses suggest that infants have a basic set of "core" expectations about the world that are shared with adults and other species. However, little work has asked what purpose these surprise responses serve. Here we discuss recent evidence that violations of core knowledge offer special opportunities for learning. Infants and young children make predictions about the world on the basis of their core knowledge of objects, quantities, and social entities. We argue that when these predictions fail to match the observed data, infants and children experience an enhanced drive to seek and retain new information. This impact of surprise on learning is not equipotent. Instead, it is directed to entities that are relevant to the surprise itself; this drive propels children-even infants-to form and test new hypotheses about surprising aspects of the world. We briefly consider similarities and differences between these recent findings with infants and children, on the one hand, and findings on prediction errors in humans and non-human animals, on the other. These comparisons raise open questions that require continued inquiry, but suggest that considering phenomena across species, ages, kinds of surprise, and types of learning will ultimately help to clarify how surprise shapes thought.
认知发展研究表明，即使是最年幼的婴儿也能察觉到并对成年人感到惊讶的事件做出反应。这些惊讶反应表明，婴儿对世界有一套基本的“核心”期望，这些期望与成年人和其他物种共享。然而，很少有研究探讨这些惊讶反应的目的是什么。本文讨论了最近的证据，表明违反核心知识为学习提供了特殊机会。婴儿和幼儿会根据对物体、数量和社会实体的核心知识来预测世界。我们认为，当这些预测与观察到的数据不匹配时，婴儿和幼儿会产生更强的动力去寻找和保留新信息。这种惊讶对学习的影响不是均等的。相反，它是针对与惊讶本身相关的实体的；这种动力促使儿童——甚至婴儿——形成并测试关于世界中令人惊讶的方面的新假设。我们简要考虑了这些最近的发现与婴儿和幼儿的相似之处和不同之处，一方面是与人类和非人类动物的预测误差的发现，另一方面是与人类和非人类动物的预测误差的发现。这些比较提出了需要进一步研究的开放性问题，但表明考虑跨物种、年龄、不同类型的惊讶和不同类型的学习的现象，最终将有助于阐明惊讶如何塑造思维。
