Second-order correlation learning in infancy

婴儿期的二阶相关学习

• 批准号: 1228322
• 负责人: David Rakison
• 金额: $ 15万
• 依托单位: Carnegie-Mellon University
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Continuing Grant
• 财政年份: 2012
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2012-08-15 至 2016-07-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1228322&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Second; order; correlation; learning; infancy

The ability to categorize objects--such as dogs, cats, cars, furniture and people--is one of the foundations of early perceptual and cognitive development. Many of the objects in these categories tend to have features that co-occur together, such that things that have wings and beaks tend also to have claws and lay eggs. It is now well established that infants in the first year of life are adept at learning such co-occurrences among static non-moving features, and by the second year of life they can do so for dynamic features involved in motion (e.g., things with legs walk and things with wheels roll). It remains to be seen if infants are able to learn about such co-occurring features if they are rarely, if ever, observed together. This ability is important because it is impossible for infants to observe every feature of an object at the same time, and consequently they must generalize from their experience to develop expectations about unseen features of objects. The research supported by the award will use the infant-controlled habituation method to address this issue by examining whether infants and young children between 18 and 26 months of age are able to learn that objects that move in different ways tend to have a co-occurring object part even though they never experience the motion and the part together. In other words, if infants and young children learn that objects with legs walk and that things with legs have eyes, will they infer that things with eyes walk? The findings will be of direct relevance to developmental psychology. The results will help researchers to understand how infants and young children learn about the complex features of object categories in the world, and they will demonstrate that children possess a potentially powerful--but as yet unexplored--way to generalize their knowledge in the first years of life. The project also has the potential for practical application for early educators because it could help to elucidate a completely novel way to teach young children how to make broader generalizations from limited data. This is important because classroom activities aim to promote the transfer of knowledge from the original instructional context and the kind of learning examined in this work may help to enable this transfer automatically. In a similar vein, it is also feasible to use the limits of this kind of learning to predict which math and science problems are likely to pose difficulty to children when entering school. In addition to the practical benefits for society, the proposed work will provide an outstanding training opportunity for undergraduate students to gain extensive one-on-one experience in conducting scientific research that will prepare them for graduate programs, and potentially, a career in science or education.

对物体进行分类的能力（例如狗，猫，汽车，家具和人）是早期感知和认知发展的基础之一。这些类别中的许多物体往往具有共同发生的特征，因此具有翅膀和喙的东西也往往具有爪子和产卵。现在已经很好地确定，生命的第一年的婴儿擅长学习静态非移动特征之间的这种同时出现，而到生命的第二年，他们可以为运动中的动态特征（例如，腿部走路和带轮子滚动的东西）这样做。如果婴儿很少（如果有的话）一起观察到这种共同发生的特征，是否能够学习这种共同出现的特征，还有待观察。这种能力很重要，因为婴儿不可能同时观察对象的每个功能，因此他们必须从经验中概括以发展对看不见的物体特征的期望。该奖项支持的研究将使用婴儿控制的习惯方法来解决这个问题，来检查婴儿和幼儿18至26个月大的孩子是否能够了解，即使他们从未体验到运动和部分，以不同方式移动的对象也倾向于具有共同发生的对象部分。换句话说，如果婴儿和年幼的孩子得知腿部行走的物体并且有腿的东西有眼睛，他们会用眼睛走路的东西吗？ 这些发现将与发展心理学直接相关。这些结果将帮助研究人员了解婴儿和幼儿如何了解世界上对象类别的复杂特征，他们将证明儿童具有潜在的强大功能 - 但尚未探索 - 在生命的第一年中概括了他们的知识。该项目还具有对早期教育工作者的实际应用，因为它可以帮助阐明一种完全新颖的方式来教幼儿如何从有限的数据中进行更广泛的概括。这很重要，因为课堂活动旨在从原始的教学环境中促进知识的转移，而在本工作中检查的学习类型可能有助于自动启用此转移。同样，使用这种学习的限制来预测哪些数学和科学问题在进入学校时可能会构成困难，这也是可行的。除了对社会的实际利益外，拟议中的工作还将为本科生提供杰出的培训机会，以获得一对一的一对一经验，这些经验将为研究生课程做好准备，并有可能是科学或教育的职业。