Infants performed earlier gaze shifts in the frequent condition when the hand reached for the same object in all trials as compared to the non-frequent condition, in which the hand reached for different objects across trials. In an eye-tracking paradigm, infants observed hands reaching towards one of three objects on the table, grasping the objects and placing them in a bowl. For example, Henrichs and colleagues (2014) investigated whether goal certainty modulated action prediction patterns of 12-month-old infants. Previous research has also shown that infants use probabilistic information to inform their predictions about others’ actions. These results suggest that infants infer preferences of others based on violation of random sampling. If, on the other hand, the agent had picked the same toys from a population box in which the two types of toys were more evenly distributed, they picked this toy less often. When the toddlers were then asked to give the agent the toy he liked best, they often chose the toy that the agent picked before. In a study by Kushnir, Xu, and Wellman (2010), 20-month-old children observed an agent picking five toys of the same type from a population box that held mostly toys from a different type. If, however, an agent consistently picks the same items from a population in a non-random way (e.g., all white balls from a predominantly red population), the observer might interpret this as an indication of a preference for a certain item. If this expectation is violated, this is reflected in an increased looking time. In other words, if a population contains mainly red balls, infants expect sampling from the population to be random, resulting in a sample of mainly red balls. Xu and Garcia (2008) showed that infants as young as eight months of age look longer at a sample of colored balls if it is picked from a population of balls with mostly other colors, suggesting that they were expecting a different sample given the population. A similar situation occurs when young children observe more or less probable actions of another person. When 12-month-old infants see a container in which three identical objects and a single object move around before one of them exits the container, they look longer when the single object leaves the container rather than one of the majority objects. They use these inferences to form expectations about future events and show surprise when these events unfold differently. From a very young age, children are able to infer that some events are more probable than others.
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