
Making Sense of Infants’ Differential Responses to Incongruity
Author(s) -
Gina C. Mireault,
Vasudevi Reddy
Publication year - 2020
Publication title -
human development
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.232
H-Index - 60
eISSN - 1423-0054
pISSN - 0018-716X
DOI - 10.1159/000509980
Subject(s) - sophistication , psychology , simple (philosophy) , cognitive psychology , cognition , epistemology , developmental psychology , sociology , social science , philosophy , neuroscience
Infants show strikingly different reactions to incongruity: looking or smiling. The former occurs in response to magical events and the latter to humorous events. We argue that these reactions depend largely on the respective experimental methodologies employed, including the popular violation of expectation (VOE) paradigm. Although both types of studies involve infants’ reactions to incongruity, their literatures have yet to confront each other, and researchers in each domain are drawing strikingly different conclusions regarding infants’ understanding of the world. Here, we argue that infants are sensitive to and constrained by several contextual differences in the methodologies employed by incongruity researchers that afford one or the other reaction. We apply De Jaegher and Di Paolo’s participatory sense-making framework to further understand what infants are sensitive to in these paradigms. Understanding infants’ reactions to incongruity (i.e., VOE) is necessary to clear up claims regarding the sophistication of their knowledge of physical and social phenomena. Attention to several simple methodological details is recommended.