Action anticipation in infants

人类是一个高度社会化的物种，这一事实即使在发育的最早阶段也是显而易见的。婴儿对他们的社会伴侣高度关注，并在认知上与他们接触。特别是，过去十年的研究表明，幼儿认为他人的行为不是纯粹的身体动作，而是由个人的目标和注意力状态构成的行为。这种对行动目标结构的敏感性是人类经验的基础，对社会和认知发展至关重要。然而，目前的发现并没有告诉我们婴儿是否以及如何利用这种对他人目标的敏感性来实时预测他们的行为。预测他人以目标为导向的行动对于许多形式的社会协调至关重要，包括一对一的社会互动、协作活动和交流。这个项目将通过调查婴儿根据他或她先前的目标和注意力焦点的信息从视觉上预测一个人的下一步行动的能力来解决这一文献中的空白。通过使用远程眼球跟踪系统来记录婴儿在视频监视器上观看动作时的凝视变化，研究将调查不同年龄的婴儿能够产生动作预测的情况范围。此外，这些研究还将探索发展行动预测的两个潜在因素--婴儿产生结构良好的行动的自身经验和婴儿对有关个人目标的语言信息的敏感性。通过这种方式，该项目将记录婴儿时期动作预测的出现，并提供对婴儿这种能力的发展过程的洞察。该项目将为婴儿社交能力的一个关键和基本上未被研究的方面提供基本的见解。更广泛地说，这项工作将有助于我们对社会、认知和语言发展的理解，因为它将揭示支撑幼儿在这些领域进行社会学习的社会认知过程。这些实验还将开发评估婴儿社交信息处理的新研究方法。由于在这些研究中开发的眼球跟踪方法也可以适用于更广泛的人群，因此这项研究将为跨年龄、人群，甚至可能是物种的比较工作奠定基础。这些眼球跟踪方法可能对那些对口头指令做出反应的能力有限的参与者特别有用，比如自闭症患者。通过阐明社会认知的一个重要方面的早期发展，这项工作也可能对理解临床障碍产生重要的见解，这些障碍涉及社会推理、社会注意和对他人行为的在线解释(例如，自闭症和品行障碍)。

Humans are an intensely social species, and this fact is evident even at the earliest points in development. Infants are highly attentive to their social partners and cognitively engaged with them. In particular, research over the last decade has revealed that young infants view others' behavior not as purely physical movements but rather as actions structured by the person's goals and states of attention. This sensitivity to the goal structure of action is fundamental to human experience and critical for social and cognitive development. However, current findings do not tell us whether and how infants recruit this sensitivity to others' goals in order to predict their actions in real time. Anticipating others' goal-directed actions is essential for many forms of social coordination, including one-on-one social interactions, collaborative activities and communication. This project will address this gap in the literature by investigating infants' ability to visually predict a person's next action based on information about his or her prior goals and focus of attention. By using a remote eye-tracking system to record infants' gaze shifts as they view actions on a video monitor, the studies will investigate the range of situations in which infants of different ages can generate action predictions. In addition, the studies will explore two potential contributors to the development of action prediction -- infants' own experience producing well-structured actions and infants' sensitivity to linguistic information about a person's goals. In this way, the project will both document the emergence of action prediction during infancy and provide insights into the developmental processes that contribute to this ability in infants.This project will provide foundational insights into a critical and largely unstudied aspect of social competence in infants. More broadly, this work will inform our understanding of social, cognitive and linguistic development because it will shed light on the social-cognitive processes that undergird young children's social learning in these domains. The experiments will also develop new research methods for assessing social information processing in infants. Because the eye-tracking methods developed in these studies can also be adapted for use with broader populations, this research will lay the foundation for comparative work across ages, populations, and possibly species. These eye-tracking methods may be particularly useful in participants who have limited abilities to respond to verbal instructions, such as individuals with autism. By elucidating the early development of an important aspect of social cognition, this work may also yield important insights into understanding clinical disorders that involve deficits in social reasoning, social attention, and the on-line interpretation of others' actions (for example, autism and conduct disorder).