Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Research in diverse disciplines suggests that agents own prediction errors enhance their learning. Yet, human learners alsopossess powerful capacities to learn from others. Here we ask whether infants can use others expressions of surprise asvicarious prediction error signals to infer hidden states of the world. First, we conceptually replicated Xu & Garcia (2008),showing that infants (12.0-17.9 months) looked longer at improbable than probable sampling outcomes (Experiment 1).Then we added emotional cues to the design (Experiment 2). Before revealing an outcome to an infant, the experimenterlooked at the outcome and expressed either happiness or surprise. While infants still looked longer at the improbable thanthe probable outcome following the experimenters happy expression, this trend was reversed when the experimenter hadexpressed surprise at the outcome. Such early-emerging ability to use others surprise as vicarious prediction error mayguide infants own learning about the world. Preprint:https://psyarxiv.com/8whuv