Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

In studies of infant cognition, why do babies look longer when objects pass through each other, or someone behaves inefficiently? We test 3 candidate explanations (domain-specific prediction error, domain-general endogenous curiosity, and perceptual novelty), each with a distinct, non-mutually exclusive, predicted pattern of neural activity. We scanned 17 adults using fMRI while they watched videos of agents and objects, adapted from infant behavioral research [1–4]. Cortical regions preferring social vs physical information [5,6] showed similar preferences for these stimuli. These regions, in the first run of the experiment, responded to physical and social violations (unexpected > expected outcomes), with a greater response to violations from the corresponding domain. Regions that respond to general perceptual novelty also responded to social and physical violations, regardless of domain. Thus both domain-specific, and general perceptual, cortical regions encode violations of expectation involving agents and objects. References 1. Baillargeon R, Spelke ES, Wasserman S. Object permanence in five-month-old infants. Cognition. 1985;20: 191–208. 2. Needham A, Baillargeon R. Intuitions about support in 4.5-month-old infants. Cognition. 1993;47: 121–148. 3. Gergely G, Nádasdy Z, Csibra G, Bíró S. Taking the intentional stance at 12 months of age. Cognition. 1995;56: 165–193. 4. Woodward AL. Infants selectively encode the goal object of an actor’s reach. Cognition. 1998;69: 1–34. 5. Koster-Hale J, Saxe R. Functional neuroimaging of theory of mind. Understanding Other Minds. 2013. pp. 132–163. doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199692972.003.0009 6. Fischer J, Mikhael JG, Tenenbaum JB, Kanwisher N. Functional neuroanatomy of intuitive physical inference. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2016;113: E5072–81.