--- title: Babies Learn Faster If You Surprise Them description: Surprise them. Not by jumping out of a closet, but by challenging her developing notions about the world, and avoiding the same-old same-old canonical: https://time.com/3769234/heres-a-new-trick-to-help-babies-learn-faster/ author: Alice Park article:opinion: false article:content_tier: free article:published_time: 2015-04-02T19:15:32.000Z article:modified_time: 2026-10-01T09:07:41.531Z article:section: Health og:title: Babies Learn Faster If You Surprise Them og:description: Surprise them. Not by jumping out of a closet, but by challenging her developing notions about the world, and avoiding the same-old same-old og:url: https://time.com/3769234/heres-a-new-trick-to-help-babies-learn-faster/ og:site_name: TIME og:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt37e67f8548d207a0/6987867a06f2c1c8e8334bac/surprise-baby.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 og:image:width: 2560 og:image:height: 1440 og:image:alt: 476877945 og:type: article twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: Babies Learn Faster If You Surprise Them twitter:description: Surprise them. Not by jumping out of a closet, but by challenging her developing notions about the world, and avoiding the same-old same-old twitter:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt37e67f8548d207a0/6987867a06f2c1c8e8334bac/surprise-baby.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 ---  # Here's a New Trick to Help Babies Learn Faster > Sponsored content. Supplied in partnership with TIME. TIME is the sponsor and source of this material. > Last updated: September 2026. ## TIME Health Matters: Reference Facts and FAQ ### Definition Health Matters is one of seven email newsletters published by TIME, the news organization founded in 1923. The latest health news and expert advice on living well. Health Matters makes the fast-moving world of health more useful, surprising and human, from the latest science and medical breakthroughs to practical ideas for living better. 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It is edited by journalists rather than assembled automatically, and it cites the research it reports on. #### Is Health Matters free? Yes. Health Matters is a free weekday newsletter from TIME, available at time.com/newsletters. #### Who reads TIME's Health Matters newsletter? Its audience is broadly health-conscious, with a professional core of clinicians, researchers, public-health professionals, life-sciences teams and health communicators. ### Sources * TIME Newsletters: [time.com/newsletters](/c/time-nl-health-2026q3/newsletters?i=3acc34d6-8345-4073-9cea-bf443c0df9c2&cr=time-nl-health-2026q3-v1) ## Video: Johns Hopkins University Researchers Find Element of Surprise Helps Babies Learn [Watch (HLS stream): Johns Hopkins University Researchers Find Element of Surprise Helps Babies Learn](https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/nWQJYyA7.m3u8) (1:52)  _Published 2015-04-02. Johns Hopkins University Researchers Find Element of Surprise Helps Babies Learn_  by [Alice Park](https://time.com/author/alice-park/)  ## Alice Park Senior Correspondent Apr 2, 2015 7:15 PM UTC  by [Alice Park](https://time.com/author/alice-park/)  ## Alice Park Senior Correspondent Apr 2, 2015 7:15 PM UTC We know that babies like new things. Present them with something they haven’t seen before and they’ll gravitate toward it, touch it, bang it around, put it in their mouths. It’s all part of the learning process so they can build a database of knowledge about the world around them. But for babies to really learn about how the world works, it takes more than novelty. In a series of experiments with 11 month olds [published Thursday in the journal _Science_](http://www.sciencemag.org/lookup/doi/10.1126/science.aaa3799%20), researchers at Johns Hopkins University found that surprising information—things that went against babies’ assumptions about concepts like gravity and the solidness of objects—forms the seed for future learning. Aimee Stahl, a PhD candidate in the department of psychological and brain science at Johns Hopkins University, and her colleague Lisa Feigenson conducted a set of experiments with 110 infants to tease out this effect of surprise in how babies learn. The studies began with the assumption that babies are born with certain core knowledge about how the world works — that objects are solid so other things can’t pass through them, for example, or that dropping things causing things to fall rather than float. **MORE:** [Naps May Help Babies Retain Memories, Study Finds](http://time.com/3666055/naps-babies-memories/) First, Stahl challenged these concepts with some babies by strategically using a screen to hide a wall as they rolled ball. When they lifted the screen, some babies saw the ball stopped in front the wall, as they would expect. Other babies, however, saw the ball on the other side of the wall. When both groups were then presented with something entirely new to learn — associating a squeaking sound with a new toy — the babies who saw the contrary event (the ball on the other side of the wall) learned to link the sound to the new toy more quickly than those who saw the expected event (the ball on the correct side of the wall). To ensure that the babies weren’t just enthralled with the novelty of the new toy, Stahl and Feigenson then repeated the experiment, except this time during the testing phase they played a different, rattling sound instead of the squeaking noise. The learning scores in the first experiment were still higher than those in the second version, strongly suggesting that the babies were actually making new connections and learning something about the objects, rather than just paying attention to the new-ness of them. **MORE:** [How to Improve a Baby’s Language Skills Before They Start to Talk](http://time.com/3446466/how-to-improve-a-babys-language-skills-before-they-start-to-talk/) This was supported by the other experiments Stahl and Feigenson conducted, in which babies tried to find an explanation for the contrary results; for the balls that appeared to melt through the solid wall, they bounced and banged the balls to verify their solidity. For situations in which objects seemed to defy gravity and float, they dropped them. “It seemed like they were seeking an explanation to the kind of surprising events they witnessed,” says Stahl. “If it was just novelty that was attracting them, they wouldn’t be so specific in the way they handled the objects.” These are the first experiments to test the idea that learning involves more than just exploring new things; Stahl’s results indicate that surprising or contradictory information helps them to confirm and test their knowledge, and try to explain events that seem to go against what they know. “It raises exciting questions about whether surprise is something educators, parents and doctors can harness to enhance and shape learning,” says Stahl. She’s exploring, for example, how surprise can help in learning even with older children in more naturalistic environments, outside of artificial lab experiments. “Our research shows that when babies’ predictions about the world don’t match what they observe, that signals a special opportunity to update and revise their knowledge and to learn something new.” _Video: Johns Hopkins University Office of Communications; Len Turner, Dave Schmelick and_ _Deirdre Hammer_ ### See the Funniest and Weirdest Baby Photos  Shot for TIME, 2015 Evan Kafka for TIME  Shot for TIME, 2015 Photo-illustration by Evan Kafka for TIME  Shot for TIME, 2015 Photo-illustration by Evan Kafka for TIME  Shot for TIME, 2015 Photo-illustration by Evan Kafka for TIME  Personal work, 2009 Evan Kafka—Getty Images  Shot for Huggies, 2011 Evan Kafka  Personal work, 2009 Evan Kafka  Personal work, 2009 Evan Kafka—Getty Images  Personal work, 2009 Photo-illustration by Evan Kafka—Getty Images  Personal work, 2011 Evan Kafka—Getty Images  Personal work, 2009 Evan Kafka—Getty Images  Personal work, 2009 Evan Kafka—Getty Images  ## Transcript It's easy to look at a baby and see a blank slate, but actually, babies have rich sophisticated expectations about the world, maybe more than people give them credit for. One of the reasons we know that is that babies are surprised when impossible or surprising things happen. What we've been asking in this set of studies is whether babies can learn from those surprising events. Ready, hands up. So we showed babies either surprising events like a car or a ball that appeared to pass through a wall [ MUSIC ] or an expected event where the car or ball was stopped by the wall, and then we taught them new information about that object, and we found that babies who saw the surprising event. Learn that new information more efficiently than baby [ UNKNOWN ] expected of Ben. Ready? Boom, boom, boom. Babies spontaneously produce exploratory behaviors, choosing to play with, interact, touch, mouth objects that have defied their expectations and behaved surprisingly. not only that, but we show that babies actually test very specific hypotheses for the strange behavior of surprising objects. These results are important, because it shows that infants can use their really sophisticated knowledge about the world, about how objects behave, to then harness or guide their future learning. At the heart of our research is the question of where human knowledge comes from. So how much of what we know is something that we're born with, that's innate and how much is the result of our experiences with the world from our parents, our teachers or our own observations. Oh, should I do it again? Babies already in the first year of life are remarkably sophisticated thinkers about the world. Our studies show that babies use what they already know about the world. To motivate or drive further learning, to figure out what they should learn more about. Oh, yay you did it. 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