Infants' knowledge of their own species
Infants' knowledge of their own species
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DOI：
10.1098/rstb.2010.0371
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发表时间：
2011-06-12
影响因子：
6.3
通讯作者：
Pascalis, Olivier
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Heron-Delaney, Michelle;Wirth, Sylvia;Pascalis, Olivier
对个体的第一眼识别对于社会物种来说很重要，可以通过关注面部或身体信息来实现。先前的研究表明，婴儿拥有针对进化相关刺激的感知模板，其中可能包括人类、危险动物（例如蛇），但不包括非危险动物。为了有效，这种机制应该导致系统性地优先考虑照顾人类而不是非危险动物。目前的研究使用优先观看范式，调查了婴儿早期代表人类的本质。我们发现，3.5 个月和 6 个月大的婴儿比非人类灵长类动物（大猩猩或猴子）对人类的关注更多，而非人类灵长类动物是非危险动物的典范。当婴儿被单独呈现头部或身体信息，以及同时呈现两者时，就会发生这种情况。这种对 3.5 个月大的人类的早期偏好表明，人类有一个基本的表征，其中包括头部和/或身体信息。然而，当头部和身体同时受到刺激时，新生儿只表现出对人类面孔的偏好超过非人类灵长类动物的面孔，而不是对人类的偏好超过非人类灵长类动物的面孔。研究结果表明，虽然新生儿对人脸的偏好超过其他人，但对人体的偏好只是在出生后的最初几个月才形成。这表明婴儿在 3.5 个月大时就已经获得了一些关于人体的知识，这些知识可能是从生命最初几个月与其他人类接触的特权经验中发展而来的，而不是天生能够全面识别人类的能力。
Recognition of individuals at first sight is important for social species and can be achieved by attending to facial or body information. Previous research suggests that infants possess a perceptual template for evolutionarily relevant stimuli, which may include humans, dangerous animals (e.g. snakes), but not non-dangerous animals. To be effective, such a mechanism should result in a systematic preference for attending to humans over non-dangerous animals. Using a preferential looking paradigm, the present studies investigated the nature of infants' early representation of humans. We show that 3.5- and six-month-old infants attend more to human beings than non-human primates (a gorilla or monkey) which are examplars of non-dangerous animals. This occurred when infants were presented with head or body information in isolation, as well as when both are presented simultaneously. This early preference for humans by 3.5 months of age suggests that there is a basic representation for humans, which includes both head and/or body information. However, neonates demonstrated a preference only for human faces over non-human primate faces, not for humans over non-human primates when the stimuli were presented with both head and body simultaneously. The results show that although neonates display a preference for human faces over others, preference for the human body only develops later, in the first few months of life. This suggests that infants have acquired some knowledge about the human body at 3.5 months of age that may have developed from their privileged experience with other humans in the first few months of life, rather than an innate ability to detect humans in their entirety.