RUI: Arrows of Time in Infancy

这项研究关注的是正常人类婴儿时间知识的早期发展。这些发现将告诉我们，儿童是如何适应环境的一个重要特征，即环境的时间规律。这些结果将补充最近发现的婴儿对其他基本领域的知识，如空间、重力、物体隐藏时的持续存在以及因果关系。作为时间发展心理学更广泛研究项目的一部分，这项工作可以帮助我们更好地理解儿童时间知识的增长。随着对成人时间心理学的研究，这项研究将帮助我们理解人类如何从经验流中抽象出时间感。儿童如何适应他们的世界的时间特征的知识将是有用的从业者谁设计学前教育课程和早期儿童干预计划。它还将提供有关正常发育的比较信息，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变化的向前和向后的表现非常敏感：倒过来看一部液体倾泻的电影，是非常反常的。成年人一定有内化的，有时间组织的表征数以千计的这样的转变是如何正常展开的。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，婴儿在4到12个月之间会对一些变化的时间方向产生预期，比如倒液体或打碎物体。这些实验将在许多方面补充这些发现。所有的研究都涉及将婴儿的视觉注意力与时间正常和颠倒或无序事件的录像带进行比较。第一个实验旨在通过教婴儿特定的、新颖的转变来阐明学习在时间期望发展中的作用。另外两项研究将测试4个月大的婴儿的能力极限，这一群体在一些研究中未能表现出方向性偏好。第四项研究将以新的变化为样本，以揭示8个月大的婴儿的知识广度，以及影响他们外貌偏好的电影的具体特征。最后一个实验将测试1岁的婴儿是否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。这一证据可以揭示婴儿在生命的第一年是否已经形成了比迄今为止所测试的更长时间模式的表征。＊＊＊

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. ***