Scientists call for renewed focus on in neglected area of developmental psychology

Life Span Institute director John Colombo and colleague Kimberly Cuevas have called for a renewed focus on an area of developmental psychology research that has declined over the past 25 years — contingency (operant) learning protocols in infancy. 

The paper, “A quarter century of research on infant contingency learning: Current and future directions,” was recently published in the journal Infant Behavior and Development.

This once-prominent area explores how infants learn through cause-and-effect experiences—for example, kicking to move a mobile—and was widely studied from the 1960s through the 1990s. Colombo and lead author Kimberly Cuevas, University of Connecticut, argue that the field has moved away from these foundational methods too quickly, overlooking their potential to deepen our understanding of early development. 

With growing interest in how individual infants differ in how they learn, the authors call for a return to contingency learning as a valuable research tool. They also highlight how modern techniques—such as motion capture, eye-tracking, and computational modeling—can provide new insights into infant behavior. 

The paper raises key questions, such as whether infants demonstrate a sense of agency during contingency learning, how they respond when their actions no longer produce results (goal blockage), and how these patterns might vary across populations, such as clinical vs. typically developing groups. 

Finally, the authors challenge researchers to reconsider whether current methods accurately reflect how learning unfolds in infancy—especially when changes are irregular or hard to measure—and encourage efforts to better understand conditions that promote learning and reduce data loss in infant studies.