Action anticipation in infants

婴儿的动作预期

• 批准号: 0951489
• 负责人: Amanda Woodward
• 金额: $ 39.92万
• 依托单位: University of Chicago
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Continuing Grant
• 财政年份: 2010
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2010-08-15 至 2015-07-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=0951489&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Action; anticipation; infants

Humans are an intensely social species, and this fact is evident even at the earliest points in development. Infants are highly attentive to their social partners and cognitively engaged with them. In particular, research over the last decade has revealed that young infants view others' behavior not as purely physical movements but rather as actions structured by the person's goals and states of attention. This sensitivity to the goal structure of action is fundamental to human experience and critical for social and cognitive development. However, current findings do not tell us whether and how infants recruit this sensitivity to others' goals in order to predict their actions in real time. Anticipating others' goal-directed actions is essential for many forms of social coordination, including one-on-one social interactions, collaborative activities and communication. This project will address this gap in the literature by investigating infants' ability to visually predict a person's next action based on information about his or her prior goals and focus of attention. By using a remote eye-tracking system to record infants' gaze shifts as they view actions on a video monitor, the studies will investigate the range of situations in which infants of different ages can generate action predictions. In addition, the studies will explore two potential contributors to the development of action prediction -- infants' own experience producing well-structured actions and infants' sensitivity to linguistic information about a person's goals. In this way, the project will both document the emergence of action prediction during infancy and provide insights into the developmental processes that contribute to this ability in infants.This project will provide foundational insights into a critical and largely unstudied aspect of social competence in infants. More broadly, this work will inform our understanding of social, cognitive and linguistic development because it will shed light on the social-cognitive processes that undergird young children's social learning in these domains. The experiments will also develop new research methods for assessing social information processing in infants. Because the eye-tracking methods developed in these studies can also be adapted for use with broader populations, this research will lay the foundation for comparative work across ages, populations, and possibly species. These eye-tracking methods may be particularly useful in participants who have limited abilities to respond to verbal instructions, such as individuals with autism. By elucidating the early development of an important aspect of social cognition, this work may also yield important insights into understanding clinical disorders that involve deficits in social reasoning, social attention, and the on-line interpretation of others' actions (for example, autism and conduct disorder).

人类是一种强烈的社会物种，即使在发展中最早的时候，这一事实也很明显。婴儿对社会伴侣高度关注，并认知与他们互动。特别是，在过去的十年中，研究表明，年轻的婴儿认为他人的行为不是纯粹的身体运动，而是由人的目标和关注状态构成的行为。对行动目标结构的敏感性是人类经验的基础，对社会和认知发展至关重要。但是，目前的发现并未告诉我们婴儿是否以及如何招募对他人目标的敏感性，以便实时预测其行为。 预期他人的目标指导行动对于多种形式的社会协调至关重要，包括一对一的社会互动，协作活动和沟通。该项目将根据有关其先前的目标和关注重点的信息来研究婴儿在视觉上预测下一个行动的能力，以解决文献中的这一差距。通过使用远程眼神跟踪系统记录婴儿在视频监视器上的动作时的凝视转移，研究将研究不同年龄的婴儿可以产生动作预测的情况。此外，这些研究将探讨行动预测发展的两个潜在贡献者 - 婴儿自身产生结构良好的行动和婴儿对人的目标语言信息的敏感性。 通过这种方式，该项目既可以记录婴儿期间的行动预测的出现，又可以对有助于婴儿这种能力的发展过程进行见解。该项目将为婴儿社会能力的关键和很大程度上未经研究的基本见解提供基本的见解。从更广泛的角度来看，这项工作将为我们对社会，认知和语言发展的理解提供理解，因为它将阐明社会认知过程，这些过程涉及这些领域中幼儿的社会学习。该实验还将开发用于评估婴儿社会信息处理的新研究方法。由于这些研究中开发的眼睛追踪方法也可以与更广泛的人群一起使用，因此这项研究将为跨年龄，人群和可能物种的比较工作奠定基础。这些引人注目的追踪方法可能在对诸如自闭症患者之类的口头指示能力有限的参与者中可能特别有用。通过阐明社会认知重要方面的早期发展，这项工作还可以产生重要的见解，以了解涉及社会推理，社会关注和对他人行为的在线解释（例如自闭症和行为障碍）的临床疾病。