This technique involves presenting two events to infants successively, one of which accords to a given physical principle, and the other which violates the principle. It is assumed that if infants are aware of the principle, they will look longer at the violation event because it departs from their expectation. In many applications, this technique involves prior familiarisation or habituation to a ‘lawful’ event, followed by test events that are variants of the original, one still lawful and the other unlawful.
See Habituation, Moderate-discrepancy hypothesis, Novelty preference, Numerical identity, Object identity, Pupillometry, Theory of the child’s mind (ToM), Violation of expectancy, Visual acuity, Visually reinforced preferential looking technique