Infant look-away follows a U-shaped pattern of information content, consistent with maintaining intermediate rates of information absorption (Goldilocks effect)¶

Claim · All claims
Evidence · 1 study · theoretical r3 · q2
Currency · newest study 2015 · not yet checked against its sources · not reviewed by a person

Subclaims¶

q2 i? Seven- and eight-month-old infants look away most from visual events of either very low or very high information content, selecting stimuli of intermediate complexity. → Kidd 2015

Evidence¶

Kidd 2015¶

Kidd, Celeste and Hayden, Benjamin Y. (2015). The psychology and neuroscience of curiosity. Neuron. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuron.2015.09.010

q2 · i? · theoretical · r3

The review reports the authors' infant studies (Kidd, Piantadosi, & Aslin, 2012, 2014), in which 7- and 8-month-olds viewed event sequences of varying complexity measured by an idealized learning model, with look-away marking attentional drift. The U-shaped pattern held across visual displays, auditory stimuli, and within individual infants.

"We found that infants’ probability of looking away was greatest to events of either very low information content (highly predictable) or very high information content (highly surprising)."

Discussion¶

Related Claims¶

• Infants' preference for and learning benefit from child-directed speech change over development, with CDS advantages diminishing by the third year — related
• Social contingency in parent–child interaction supports early language learning, and infants actively elicit higher-quality input through a social feedback loop — related
• Prosodic and sound-level features of child-directed speech support infants' phoneme discrimination, word segmentation, and word learning — related
• Structural features of child-directed speech—isolated words, short sentence frames, and repetition—facilitate word segmentation, processing, and word learning — related
• Core knowledge violations may be 'moderately impossible,' aligning with the Goldilocks effect on attention allocation — a narrower finding that bears on this claim
• Eleven-month-old infants who see a core knowledge violation preferentially explore the violating object over a novel distractor — related
• Eleven-month-old infants learn a new object-sound mapping after a surprising core knowledge violation but not after an expected outcome — related
• Learning enhancements from core knowledge violations are entity-specific: no benefit for unrelated bystander objects — related
• Sound localization ability is present in the first ten days of infancy as soon as the infant begins to notice sound — related