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Empirical assumptions behind the violation of expectation experiments in human and non-human animals

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Abstract

One of the most widely used procedures applied to non-human animals or pre-linguistic humans is the “violation of expectation paradigm”. Curiously there is almost no discussion in the philosophical literature about it. Our objective will be to provide a first approach to the meta-theoretical nature of the assumptions behind the procedure that appeals to the violation of expectation and to extract some consequences. We show that behind them exists an empirical principle that affirms that the violation of the expectation of certain mental rules generates surprise. We then proceeded to discuss the nature of these “mental rules”. We show that, as is often the case with theoretical concepts proposed by theories, they do not have a fixed interpretation. This will allow us to show that the usual relationship found in the developmental psychology literature between this experimental paradigm and cognitive approaches (which interpret experimental results in terms of higher-level mental activities) is not necessary. Finally, we relate this experimental design with the mark test and the inequity aversion test and discuss the possible ampliation of the application of the empirical principle of violation of expectation.

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Notes

  1. We use the term “symptoms” to include the wide range of behaviors, responses, and other (neither necessary nor sufficient) manifestations of surprise.

  2. What we mean by “neutrality” will become clearer later in the paper. But let us anticipate, we do not mean that VoE is neutral with respect to every empirical question–if it were, it would have no empirical content at all—but only with respect to certain specific controversies about the nature of the postulated mental contents (are they beliefs, capacities, abilities, are they innate, are they learned, etc.).

  3. There are some interesting considerations that could be extracted from this analysis, which we cannot discuss extensively because it would exceed the objectives of this paper. On the one hand, the presentation we made of EPVE does not make explicit the mechanism that leads to certain mental rules generating expectations, nor why the violation of those expectations generates surprise, nor why surprise implies certain specific behaviors or symptoms. This is because we are looking for the more general principle presupposed in all the applications we reviewed, and in the literature, in general, such mechanisms are not made explicit. This does not imply that more general theories that do establish such mechanisms cannot be discovered, or that such theories do not in fact exist. Focusing on our presentation of EPVE, and assuming that it is adequate, it seems that to understand its explanatory capacity we must focus on its unifying capacity. But this implies another interesting question. Unifying theories usually exhibit a network structure in which the most general principle, of an abstract nature (such as EPVE) is specialized into different special laws that have a higher empirical content. For example, the second principle of mechanics of particles specializes in different special laws that allow us to deal with planets, elastic and inelastic shocks, springs, etc. If EPVE is the fundamental principle of a unifying theory, it would be expected that we can identify different special laws with a higher empirical content that regulate different ways in which EPVE is applied to specific cases. We are not sure that this is the case. Another possibility, which we will examine in Sect. 8.2, is that EPVE is itself a special law that specializes some more general law. These are all interesting questions that we only intend to suggest in this paper and would require subsequent treatment.

  4. To maintain that the empirical principle that presupposes all application of VoE is neutral with respect to more or less rich interpretations of , and that VoE is therefore compatible in principle with different types of interpretations, does not imply that empirical evidence cannot be found that leads us to prefer certain specific interpretations. As suggested by one of the reviewers, the type of symptom of surprise chosen and the robustness of the controls that allow us to eliminate alternative explanations could be indicative of whether the violation is found, e.g., at the conceptual or perceptual level.

  5. There is, of course, an extensive discussion regarding the nature of emotions, specifically, the discussion whether they are cognitive states (e.g. Lazarus 1999; Melamed 2016; Prinz 2004). We will not address this question here because of space considerations and because it is not relevant to our point.

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Funding

This work has been funded by the research projects PUNQ 1401/15 (Universidad Nacional de Quilmes, Argentina), UNTREF 32/19 80120190100217TF (Universidad Nacional Tres de Febrero, Argentina), PICT-2018–3454 (ANPCyT, Argentina), and UBACyT 20020190200360BA (Universidad de Buenos Aires, Argentina).

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  1. CEFHIC-UNQ-CONICET, Centro de Estudios de Filosofía e Historia de la Ciencia-Universidad Nacional de Quilmes-Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas, Instituto de Estudios Sobre la Ciencia y la Tecnología, Roque Sáenz Peña 352, Bernal, Buenos Aires, B1876BXD, Argentina

    Santiago Ginnobili & Andrea Soledad Olmos

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Ginnobili, S., Olmos, A.S. Empirical assumptions behind the violation of expectation experiments in human and non-human animals. HPLS 43, 106 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40656-021-00459-7

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