Sparking Attention by Expectancy Violations

I have vivid memories of working on a research project, some years ago, feeling great confidence about its likely outcome. I was working late at night and there, in the results, was a completely unexpected, contrary-to-dominant-paradigm result. We made sure it was checked over and over again. We looked over each observation on which the conclusion was based. We couldn’t make it go away. It stimulated a whole set of new research, energized in a way uncommon in my career. That one unexpected finding was so riveting that it spawned years of work.

Recently, I encountered some commentary on learning among infants. There is now growing evidence that infants focus much more intensely on events that defy prior expectations. The experimental manipulations included a ball rolling down a ramp and apparently passing right through a solid wall. The 11-month old infants demonstrated quite unusual attention to this event relative to those that exhibited expected outcomes. In later experiments, the research showed that retention of learning was enhanced in conditions with the heightened attention. The unexpected occurrence triggers alertness, which in turn facilitates learning.

While this has obvious implications for education and experience-based learning, the results also have implications for navigating differences among us as humans. With every new tragedy or violent event in our society, we hear calls from leaders for more dialogue, listening, learning about one another’s point of view, walking in one another’s shoes. Our diversity becomes a strength only if we interact with one another.

One of the horrible features of stereotypes is that we end up expecting another to behave based only on a very limited set of information about them – their race, their gender, their age, their clothing, their speech. What we often learn, over and over again, is that no one person is so simply defined that one or two attributes determine their essence. We are all unusually complicated creatures. We have personal interests, which are not observable. We have individual ambitions, which can be learned only by engaging in dialogue. We have our own unique history, different from others who look like us. We have our own internal identities, which are complicated and elaborated. There is a surprise within each of us. But the surprises are revealed only through interpersonal interaction.

So what does this have to do with infant learning? Dialogue with another person almost always reveals an anomaly with a stereotype – the prediction based on looks fails miserably to capture the real essence of the person. When humans encounter the unexpected, just like the infants in the experiment, that’s when learning becomes self-motivated. When we observe characteristics that don’t fit our prior experience, we become interested and engaged.

The understanding resulting from this learning can be achieved only when we discover what’s beyond the obvious.