Infants evaluate informativeness of evidence and predict causal events as revealed in theta oscillations and predictive looking

Abstract

This study investigates 16-month-old infants’ sensitivity to the informativeness of evidence and its potential link to infants’ ability to draw accurate causal inferences and predict unfolding events. Employing concurrent EEG and eye tracking, data from 66 infants revealed significantly increased theta oscillatory activity when infants expected to see causally unconfounded evidence compared to confounded evidence, suggesting heightened cognitive engagement in anticipation of informative evidence. Crucially, this difference was more pronounced in the subset of infants who later made correct predictions, suggesting that they had correctly inferred the causal structure based on the evidence presented. This research sheds light on infants’ motivation to seek explanatory causal information, suggesting that even at 16 months, infants can strategically direct attention to situations conducive to acquiring informative evidence, potentially laying the groundwork for the impressive abilities of humans to rapidly acquire knowledge and develop causal theories of the world. 16-month-old infants showed heightened theta oscillations for informative versus uninformative causal evidence. This relationship was more pronounced in infants who subsequently made correct predictions based on this information.