Great expectations: The construct validity of the violation‐of‐expectation method for studying infant cognition

Abstract

Abstract The violation‐of‐expectation method has been used in thousands of studies examining the breadth and depth of preverbal infants' knowledge and cognitive capacities. In this commentary, we review evidence that supports the violation‐of‐expectation method as an important tool for infant research that has strong construct validity. We show that this method reveals infants' expectations, produces reliable results across study designs and stimuli, and is grounded in theories of learning. We support and encourage the use of this method to continue to unveil the scope and sophistication of infant cognition.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 28 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.