RUI: Arrows of Time in Infancy

RUI：婴儿时期的时间之箭

• 批准号: 9513881
• 负责人: William Friedman
• 金额: $ 9.34万
• 依托单位: Oberlin College
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Continuing Grant
• 财政年份: 1996
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 1996-09-01 至 1999-08-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=9513881&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: RUI; Arrows; Time; Infancy

9513881 FRIEDMAN This research is concerned with early development of temporal knowledge in normal human infants. The findings will tell us how children come to adapt to an important feature of their environment, its temporal regularities. The results will complement recent discoveries about infants' knowledge of other fundamental domains, such as space, gravity, the continued existence of objects when they are hidden, and causality. As part of a broader program of research on the developmental psychology of time, this work can help us better understand the growth of temporal knowledge in children. Along with research on the psychology of time in adults, this research will help us understand how humans abstract a sense of time from the flow of experience. Knowledge of how children adapt to the temporal features of their world will be useful to practitioners who design preschool curricula and early childhood intervention programs. It will also provide comparative information about normal development that can be used by clinicians who work with children with disabilities. The focus of this research is on humans' sensitivity to temporal order in simple event sequences. Adults are highly attuned to forward vs. backward presentations of transformations that can only happen in one temporal direction: A film of liquid pouring, when viewed in reverse, is strikingly anomalous. Adults must have internalized, temporally-organized representations of how thousands of such transformations normally unfold. However, very little is known about the origins and nature of this sensitivity. Preliminary work has suggested that expectations about the temporal direction of several transformations, such as pouring a liquid or breaking an object, develop between 4 and 12 months of age. These experiments will add to these findings in a number of ways. All of the studies involve comparisons of infants' visual attention to videotapes of temporally normal and reversed or mi s-ordered events. A first experiment is designed to illuminate the role that learning plays in the development of temporal expectations by teaching infants specific, novel transformations. Two other studies will test the limits of competence in 4-month-olds, a group which has failed to show directional preferences in some studies. A fourth study will sample new transformations in order to shed light on the breadth of 8-month-olds' knowledge and on the specific features of the films that are responsible for their looking preferences. A final experiment will test whether 1-year-old infants have developed expectations of the temporal order of familiar event sequences made up of discrete actions. This evidence can reveal whether infants in the first year of life have developed representations of lengthier time patterns than have been tested to date. ***

9513881 FRIEDMAN 这项研究涉及正常人类婴儿时间知识的早期发展。 研究结果将告诉我们儿童如何适应环境的一个重要特征，即时间规律。 这些结果将补充最近关于婴儿对其他基本领域知识的发现，例如空间、重力、物体隐藏时的持续存在以及因果关系。 作为更广泛的时间发展心理学研究计划的一部分，这项工作可以帮助我们更好地了解儿童时间知识的增长。 连同对成年人时间心理学的研究，这项研究将帮助我们了解人类如何从经验的流动中抽象出时间感。 了解儿童如何适应世界的时间特征对于设计学前课程和早期儿童干预计划的从业者来说是有用的。 它还将提供有关正常发育的比较信息，可供从事残疾儿童工作的临床医生使用。 这项研究的重点是人类对简单事件序列中时间顺序的敏感性。 成年人对只能在一个时间方向上发生的转变的向前和向后的呈现高度敏感：当反向观看时，一部液体倾倒的电影是惊人的反常。 成年人必须对数千种这样的转变通常如何展开有内化的、按时间组织的表征。 然而，人们对这种敏感性的起源和性质知之甚少。 初步研究表明，对几种转变（例如倒液体或打破物体）的时间方向的预期在 4 至 12 个月大的时候形成。 这些实验将以多种方式补充这些发现。 所有的研究都涉及婴儿对时间正常事件和颠倒或错误顺序事件的录像带的视觉注意力的比较。 第一个实验旨在通过教导婴儿特定的、新颖的转变来阐明学习在时间期望发展中所扮演的角色。 另外两项研究将测试 4 个月大婴儿的能力极限，该群体在一些研究中未能表现出方向偏好。 第四项研究将对新的转变进行抽样，以揭示 8 个月大的孩子知识的广度以及影响他们观看偏好的电影的具体特征。 最后的实验将测试一岁婴儿是否已经对由离散动作组成的熟悉事件序列的时间顺序产生了期望。这一证据可以揭示生命第一年的婴儿是否已经形成了比迄今为止测试的更长的时间模式的表征。 ***