violation-of-expectation method
a technique for studying infant cognition, based on habituation and dishabituation procedures, in which increases in an infant’s looking time at an event or other stimulus are interpreted as evidence that the outcome he or she expected has not occurred. For example, while a baby watches, a researcher may repeatedly return a toy to a blue box. If the researcher sometime later retrieves the same toy from a nearby red box (after a confederate surreptitiously moved it) and the baby looks longer at that red box, it is assumed that he or she has some understanding of object permanence and was not expecting the toy to be there.