DEVELOPING EFFECTIVE STRATEGIES FOR GRASPING OBJECTS

本研究的目的是研究婴儿在抓取物体之前，通过调整他们的手来有效地抓取物体的能力的发展。本建议中的实验旨在(a)发现婴儿可能手动预测的新的（尚未研究的）物体属性类型，(b)调查婴儿关于最佳抓取策略的行动或知识的自动化是否会影响婴儿产生这些行为，以及(c)确定是否存在促进这些行为发展的学习或实践背景。这些问题将在分为四个部分的18个拟议实验中讨论。第一部分包括探索婴儿对物体属性的预期的研究，这些研究尚未被研究，希望确定婴儿在不同物体物理属性上表现出手动预期行为的年龄是否存在一致性。第二部分使用双任务范式来确定第二个同时任务的增加是否会影响大婴儿表现这些预期行为的能力。第三部分使用视觉任务来确定婴儿是否能够在他们自己产生这些行为之前区分对物体的适当和不适当的行为方式。最后，第四部分探讨了可能促进这些预期抓取行为发展的三种不同的学习环境。这项拟议的研究将增加我们对婴儿如何伸手去拿物体的理解，也可能为过去15年来婴儿研究中最令人困惑的难题之一提供线索：为什么婴儿在用视觉实验程序测试时表现出如此令人眼花缭乱的能力，而在用手动测试时却没有表现出同样的能力或期望。

The goal of the proposed research is to investigate the development of infants' ability to grasp objects effectively by accommodating their hands to object properties prior to grasping the object. The experiments in this proposal are designed to (a) discover new (as yet unstudied) kinds of object properties that infants may manually anticipate, (b) investigate whether automatization of infants' actions or knowledge about optimal grasping strategies influences infants' production of these behaviors, and (c) determine whether there are learning or practice contexts that facilitate the development of these behaviors. These issues are addressed in 18 proposed experiments organized into four sections. The first section consists of studies that explore infants' anticipation of object properties that have yet to be studied, with the hope of determining whether there is consistency in the age at which infants display manual anticipatory behaviors across different physical properties of objects. The second section uses a dual-task paradigm to determine whether the addition of a second simultaneous task affects older infants' ability to display these anticipatory behaviors. The third section uses visual tasks to determine whether or not infants can differentiate appropriate from inappropriate ways of acting upon objects prior to the time that they produce these behaviors themselves. And finally, the fourth section examines three different learning contexts that may facilitate the development of these anticipatory grasping behaviors. The proposed research will add to our understanding of how young infants reach for objects and could also lead to clues about one of the most perplexing puzzles of infant research in the past 15 years: why young infants display such dazzling competencies when tested with visually-based experimental procedures, yet do not typically reveal these same abilities or expectations when tested with manually-based measures.