Timing is everything! We have long proposed that infants figure out who and what to learn from by tuning into people and behaviors that are contingently responsive to infants’ own actions (in this case, babbling). This would explain how social behaviors, like language, are prioritized and rapidly learned over the many other sources of stimulation in infants’ environments. In our new article, Contingency enables the formation of social expectations about an artificial agent, we tested this by introducing infants to a remote-controlled car that we set up to verbally respond to infants, either contingently on their babbling or randomly. As an additional control, we introduced a second group of infants to an equally unfamiliar and responsive adult. We found that infants who received contingent feedback for their babbling from the robot car quickly formed strong expectations that the robot car should continue to interact with them. They showed a stronger effect with the robot car than with the unfamiliar human! This means that the timing of our interactions with babies is crucially important for their attention and learning.

Read more in the Cornell Chronicle’s recent coverage of our article!