--- title: Johns Hopkins University Researchers Find Element of Surprise Helps Babies Learn | TIME description: Johns Hopkins University Researchers Find Element of Surprise Helps Babies Learn canonical: https://time.com/video/nWQJYyA7/ og:title: Johns Hopkins University Researchers Find Element of Surprise Helps Babies Learn og:description: Johns Hopkins University Researchers Find Element of Surprise Helps Babies Learn og:url: https://time.com/video/nWQJYyA7/ og:image: https://cdn.jwplayer.com/v2/media/nWQJYyA7/poster.jpg?width=720 og:type: video.other twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: Johns Hopkins University Researchers Find Element of Surprise Helps Babies Learn twitter:description: Johns Hopkins University Researchers Find Element of Surprise Helps Babies Learn twitter:image: https://cdn.jwplayer.com/v2/media/nWQJYyA7/poster.jpg?width=720 --- # Johns Hopkins University Researchers Find Element of Surprise Helps Babies Learn > Sponsored content. 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They are at time.com/newsletters and are separate from a paid subscription. ## 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_ --- Jul 27, 2023 6:07 PM UTC --- ## More From This Series [All Videos](https://time.com/video/) [Researchers Find Women Make Better Surgeons Than Men](/video/JCHYUMTh/) ### Researchers Find Women Make Better Surgeons Than Men [Berkeley Researchers Wants Robot To Learn Like A Toddler](/video/gDQJEyB0/) ### Berkeley Researchers Wants Robot To Learn Like A Toddler [Know Right Now: Research Finds Most Sunscreens Ineffective](/video/DPTj9QpV/) ### Know Right Now: Research Finds Most Sunscreens Ineffective --- ## 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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