The Development of Infants Action Knowledge

从社会伙伴那里有效地学习，要求孩子们不把别人的行为纯粹理解为通过空间的物理运动，而是根据他们潜在的目标或意图来理解。在美国国家科学基金会（National Science Foundation）的支持下，伍德沃德博士将调查婴儿时期这种基本能力的起源。最近的研究开发了一种技术，利用婴儿的注意力模式作为他们对所观察到的行为的理解的证据。这项技术的结果表明，婴儿理解一些行为的目标导向性质，包括抓握、工具使用和注意行为（即看）。目前的研究将使用相同的技术来调查有助于婴儿理解他人目标的经验和过程。特别是，这些研究评估了婴儿自己的行为为他人的行为是目标导向的见解提供基础的可能性。为了解决这一问题，这些研究考察了实验诱导经验对婴儿行动知识的影响。研究问题涉及第一人称和观察经验的相对影响，以及婴儿将他们从这些经验中学到的东西推广到新情况的程度。这些研究将首次系统地调查学习行动对婴儿理解他人行为的影响。这项工作将对社会知识及其在早期发展中的动态出现产生新的见解。通过将婴儿认知发展置于婴儿在物质和社会世界中作为代理人的新兴能力的更大背景下，本研究将为婴儿认知发展过程提供新的见解。更广泛地说，这项研究是研究学习在婴儿概念发展中的作用的一个日益增长的运动的一部分。此外，研究结果将有助于理解社会背景下的知识获取，因为意图的概念支持社会学习的许多方面。这项研究也与理解发展出错的案例有关。社会推理缺陷与发育障碍有关，包括自闭症、阿斯伯格综合症和品行障碍。发现在正常发育的儿童中创造社会理解的过程将为这些发育障碍的科学和临床理解提供信息。

Effective learning from social partners requires that children interpret other people's actions not as purely physical motions through space, but rather in terms of their underlying goals or intentions. With support from the National Science Foundation, Dr. Woodward will investigate the origins of this foundational ability during infancy. Recent studies have developed a technique for using infants' patterns of attention as evidence about their understanding of the actions they observe. Results from this technique have revealed that infants understand the goal-directed nature of some actions, including grasping, tool use, and acts of attention (i.e., looking). The current studies will use the same technique to investigate the experiences and processes that contribute to infants' understanding of others' goals. In particular, the studies evaluate the possibility that infants' own actions provide a basis for the insight that others' actions are goal-directed. To address this issue, these studies examine the effect of experimentally induced experience on infants' action knowledge. Research questions concern the relative effects of first-person and observational experience, as well as the extent to which infants generalize what they have learned from these experiences to new situations. These studies will provide the first systematic investigation of the effects of learning to act on infants' understanding of others' actions.This work will yield new insights into social knowledge and its dynamic emergence in early development. By situating infant cognitive development within the larger context of infants' emerging competence as agents in the physical and social worlds, this research will provide new insights into processes of cognitive development during infancy. More generally, this research is part of a growing movement to study the role of learning in infants' conceptual development. In addition, the findings will inform understanding of knowledge acquisition in social settings because concepts of intention support many aspects of social learning. This research is also relevant to understanding cases in which development goes awry. Deficits in social reasoning have been implicated in developmental disorders including autism, asperger's syndrome, and conduct disorder. Discovering the processes that create social understanding in typically developing children will inform scientific and clinical understanding of these developmental disorders.