INFANTS' APPROACH TO LEARNING ABOUT THE PHYSICAL WORLD

婴儿学习物理世界的方法

• 批准号: 2198173
• 负责人: RENEE L BAILLARGEON
• 金额: $ 12.85万
• 依托单位: UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS AT URBANA-CHAMPAIGN
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 财政年份: 1985
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 1985-12-01 至 1997-11-30
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/2198173
• 关键词: behavior test; child behavior; child psychology; cognition; early experience; human subject; infant human (0-1 year); learning; motion perception; performance; size perception; space perception; visual perception

Recent research indicates that even 3.5-month-old infants are able to represent and to reason about the existence and properties of occluded objects. The presence of sophisticated physical reasoning at such a young age suggests that infants are born prepared to learn about physical events. Experiments on infants' reasoning about occlusion, support, and collision events suggest three hypotheses about infants' approach to the task of learning about the physical world. The first is that in their initial pass at understanding a class of physical events, infants build all-or-none, core representations that capture the essence of the events but few of the details. With further experience,e these core representations are progressively elaborated. Infants slowly identify the variables that are relevant to the events' outcomes, study their effects, and incorporate this accrued knowledge into their reasoning, resulting in increasing accurate predictions over time. The second hypothesis is that, once infants have identified variables as being relevant to events, they are able to reason first qualitatively and only later quantitatively about the effects of these variables. Finally, the third hypothesis is that, although infants' approach to learning about the physical world remains the same throughout infancy, what events are understood at what ages depends on a host of developmental factors including infant's visual, motoric, and representational abilities. The research proposed in this application will build on the three hypotheses just described. Five lines of research are planned. The first will focus on the distinction between core events and variables; some experiments will investigate further infants' understanding of the variables that affect support and collision events, while others will attempt to determine whether additional events also lend themselves to descriptions in terms of core events and variables. The second line of research will seek to shed further light on the distinction between infants' qualitative and quantitative physical reasoning. The third line of research will examine how representational factors affect the age at which infants come to understand different types of physical events. The fourth line of research will begin to examine the role of causality in infants' reasoning and learning about core events and variables. Finally, the fifth line of research will begin to explore the nature of the experiences that lead infants to identify core events and variables.

最近的研究表明，即使是3.5个月大的婴儿也能 对遮挡的存在和性质进行表述和推理 物体。复杂的物理推理在这种情况下的存在 年龄小意味着婴儿生来就准备好学习体育知识 事件。婴幼儿对咬合、支持、与牙合关系的推理实验 碰撞事件提出了三个关于婴儿接近 学习物理世界的任务。第一个是在他们的 初步了解一类物理事件，婴儿建立 要么全有，要么全不，捕捉事件本质的核心表示 但细节却很少。有了进一步的经验，这些核心 陈述是逐步细化的。婴儿慢慢地辨认 与事件结果相关的变量，研究它们的 影响，并将积累的知识纳入他们的推理中， 结果是随着时间的推移，预测的精确度越来越高。第二 假设是，一旦婴儿识别出变量是 与事件相关，他们能够首先进行定性推理，而且只有 随后对这些变量的影响进行了量化分析。最后， 第三个假设是，尽管婴儿学习关于 物理世界在整个婴儿期都是一样的，什么是事件 对年龄的理解取决于一系列发育因素 包括婴儿的视觉、运动和表象能力。 本申请中提出的研究将建立在这三个基础上 刚才描述的假设。计划开展五项研究。这个 首先将重点放在核心事件和变量之间的区别； 一些实验将进一步调查婴儿对 影响支持和碰撞事件的变量，而其他变量将 尝试确定其他事件是否也适合 对核心事件和变量的描述。第二行 研究将寻求进一步阐明两者之间的区别 幼儿的定性和定量的物理推理。第三行 研究将考察代表性因素如何影响年龄 这些婴儿开始理解不同类型的身体事件。这个 第四条研究线将开始检验因果关系在 婴儿对核心事件和变量的推理和学习。 最后，第五条研究线将开始探索 引导婴儿识别核心事件和变量的经验。