After someone sees an object violate a basic physical expectation, what happens next in their representation of that object? One possibility is that they stop treating it as an object at all and stop forming predictions about it. Another is that they rapidly update their beliefs, so they actively expect it to continue to behave surprisingly. A third is that they continue to expect it to obey physical principles, but do not specify which principle was violated. A fourth is that they keep track of the specific violation, and use that record to guide what they attend to and learn next. This line of work aims to disambiguate these alternatives.

(Spoiler: current evidence suggests the fourth! Stay tuned!) 

As adults, we know that surprise signals encountering new information and results in a change in what someone knows. How does this understanding develop? In this line of work, I ask how infants:
(1) use others' surprise to guide their own information seeking, 

(2) use this emotion to infer the emoter's subsequent actions, 

(3) represent the cause of surprise, which is epistemic by nature. Specifically, can they treat surprise as evidence of discovering something that is new for that particular emoter?

(stay tuned to our upcoming papers along this line!) 

Work such as the Ames-Hunter model asks when infants prefer familiar versus novel information. In our work on surprise, we find that infants prefer interacting with the surprising object despite it being familiar. I aim to ask: how do infants decide that they have gathered enough evidence to restore a coherent conceptual model? Are there meaningful individual differences in this information-gain evaluation procedure? And does that information gain function differ from the one infants use when they are building a perceptual description of an object? 

Humans hold special expectations that people behave differently from inanimate objects. What remains unknown is whether this knowledge extends to a more fundamental level: whether people and objects are expected to differ in their visual uniqueness. As adults, we readily accept that artifacts (such as coffee mugs) can look identical to each other, whereas it is rare for human beings (such as your neighbors) to look exactly alike. This project asks whether young infants also hold such expectations, and whether this knowledge about visual uniqueness is acquired through nature or nurture.