The Development of Infants Action Knowledge

婴儿动作知识的发展

• 批准号: 0446706
• 负责人: Amanda Woodward
• 金额: $ 32.5万
• 依托单位: University of Chicago
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2005
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2005-03-01 至 2006-08-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=0446706&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Development; Infants; Action; Knowledge

Effective learning from social partners requires that children interpret other people's actions not as purely physical motions through space, but rather in terms of their underlying goals or intentions. With support from the National Science Foundation, Dr. Woodward will investigate the origins of this foundational ability during infancy. Recent studies have developed a technique for using infants' patterns of attention as evidence about their understanding of the actions they observe. Results from this technique have revealed that infants understand the goal-directed nature of some actions, including grasping, tool use, and acts of attention (i.e., looking). The current studies will use the same technique to investigate the experiences and processes that contribute to infants' understanding of others' goals. In particular, the studies evaluate the possibility that infants' own actions provide a basis for the insight that others' actions are goal-directed. To address this issue, these studies examine the effect of experimentally induced experience on infants' action knowledge. Research questions concern the relative effects of first-person and observational experience, as well as the extent to which infants generalize what they have learned from these experiences to new situations. These studies will provide the first systematic investigation of the effects of learning to act on infants' understanding of others' actions.This work will yield new insights into social knowledge and its dynamic emergence in early development. By situating infant cognitive development within the larger context of infants' emerging competence as agents in the physical and social worlds, this research will provide new insights into processes of cognitive development during infancy. More generally, this research is part of a growing movement to study the role of learning in infants' conceptual development. In addition, the findings will inform understanding of knowledge acquisition in social settings because concepts of intention support many aspects of social learning. This research is also relevant to understanding cases in which development goes awry. Deficits in social reasoning have been implicated in developmental disorders including autism, asperger's syndrome, and conduct disorder. Discovering the processes that create social understanding in typically developing children will inform scientific and clinical understanding of these developmental disorders.

从社会伴侣那里学习的有效学习要求儿童解释别人的行为，而不是通过太空纯粹的身体运动，而是根据他们的基本目标或意图来解释他人的行为。在国家科学基金会的支持下，伍德沃德博士将研究婴儿期这种基础能力的起源。最近的研究开发了一种技术，用于使用婴儿的关注模式，以证明他们对他们观察到的行为的理解。该技术的结果表明，婴儿了解某些动作的目标定向性质，包括抓握，工具使用和关注行为（即看）。当前的研究将使用相同的技术来研究有助于婴儿对他人目标的理解的经验和过程。特别是，研究评估了婴儿自己的行为为他人的行为指导的洞察力提供了基础。为了解决这个问题，这些研究研究了实验诱导的经验对婴儿行动知识的影响。研究问题涉及第一人称和观察经验的相对影响，以及婴儿从这些经验中学到的知识的程度。这些研究将对学习对婴儿对他人的理解的影响的影响进行首次系统研究。这项工作将为社会知识及其在早期发展中的动态出现提供新的见解。通过将婴儿的认知发展置于婴儿作为物理和社会世界中新兴的能力的更大背景下，这项研究将为婴儿期在认知发展过程中提供新的见解。更一般而言，这项研究是研究学习在婴儿概念发展中的作用的日益增长的运动的一部分。此外，这些发现将为社会环境中知识获取的理解提供信息，因为意图的概念支持社会学习的许多方面。这项研究也与理解开发问题的案例有关。社会推理的缺陷与包括自闭症，阿斯伯格综合症和行为障碍在内的发育障碍有关。发现在典型发展儿童中创造社会理解的过程将为这些发育障碍的科学和临床理解提供信息。