ACTIVE AND LATENT REPRESENTATIONS IN INFANCY

这项研究涉及两种不同类型的知识表示- - 主动和潜在-及其在婴儿任务依赖性 隐藏对象的行为。 婴儿可能会出现早熟或限制 几乎任何能力都取决于他们所承担的任务。 为 例如，3.5个月大的婴儿对 视觉习惯研究中隐藏物体的持续存在， 然而，婴儿在9岁左右才能手动找回隐藏的物体， 个月，独立于任何运动或解决问题的缺陷。这 研究探索了婴儿使用潜在的 在视觉习惯化中识别不寻常事件的表征 研究，但需要后来发展积极的表征，以检索 被遮挡的物体。 积极的表达方式是持续的 神经元放电，而潜在的表征形式的变化 在影响神经元的放电阈值或神经元连接中， 仅在后续处理中进行。 拟议的研究是改编自非人类使用的任务 灵长类动物的神经机制和行为表现 主动表征和潜在表征之间的关系已经得到了比较好的理解。 这些研究有两个具体目标。首先，他们调查了婴儿的 形成主动和潜在表征的偏见和能力。 其次，他们试图确定积极的潜在贡献， 和潜在表征对婴儿任务依赖行为的影响， 隐藏的物体。 第一项研究验证了一个假设，即婴儿和非婴儿一样， 人类灵长类动物，偏向于形成潜伏的，而不是主动的 当任何一个都足以完成手头的任务时，研究2 测试了婴儿像非人类灵长类动物一样拥有一些 形成活动表征的能力， 他们对潜在表征的偏见 任务依赖行为可能 提供了一个了解发展的心理和神经基础的窗口， 因此，这些研究的结果可能会为理论及其应用提供信息， 包括典型人群和特殊人群。

This research addresses two distinct types of knowledge representations- -active and latent--and their potential role in infants' task-dependent behavior with hidden objects. Infants can appear precocious or limited in almost any ability depending on the task administered to them. For example, infants as young as 3.5 months show an apparent sensitivity to the continued existence of hidden objects in visual habituation studies, yet infants fail to manually retrieve hidden objects until around 9 months, independent of any motor or problem-solving deficits. This research explores the possibility that infants use latent representations to recognize unusual events in visual habituation studies, but require later developing active representations to retrieve occluded objects. Active representations take the form of sustained neuronal firing, while latent representations take the form of changes in firing thresholds or neuronal connections that affect neuronal activity only in subsequent processing. The proposed studies are adapted from tasks used with non-human primates, in which the neural mechanisms and behavioral manifestations of active and latent representations are relatively well understood. The studies have two specific aims. First, they investigate infants' biases and capacities for forming active and latent representations. Second, they attempt to identify the potential contributions from active and latent representations to infants' task-dependent behavior with hidden objects. Study 1 tests the hypothesis that infants, like non- human primates, are biased to form latent rather than active representations when either will suffice for the task at hand. Study 2 tests the hypothesis that infants, like non-human primates, possess some capacity for forming active representations that may be obscured by their bias for latent representations. Task-dependent behaviors may provide a window onto the psychological and neural bases of development, so results from these studies may inform theory and its application to both typical and special populations.