INFANTS' APPROACH TO LEARNING ABOUT THE PHYSICAL WORLD

婴儿学习物理世界的方法

• 批准号: 3319849
• 负责人: RENEE L BAILLARGEON
• 金额: $ 12.1万
• 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/3319849
• 关键词: behavior test; child behavior; child psychology; cognition; early experience; human subject; infant human (0-1 year); learning; motion perception; performance; 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个月大的婴儿也能够 代表和理由的存在和性质的闭塞 对象 复杂的物理推理在这样一个 年轻的年龄表明，婴儿出生时就准备好学习身体知识， 事件 幼儿对遮挡、支撑、 碰撞事件提出了三种关于婴儿接近 学习物理世界的任务。 第一，在他们的 通过初步了解一类物理事件， 要么全有要么全无，抓住事件本质的核心表示 但没说什么细节 随着进一步的经验，这些核心 表示是逐步详细阐述的。 婴儿慢慢地识别 与事件结果相关的变量，研究它们的 影响，并将这些累积的知识纳入他们的推理， 从而导致随着时间的推移而增加的准确预测。 第二 假设是，一旦婴儿识别出变量是 与事件相关，他们能够首先定性地推理， 然后再定量分析这些变量的影响。 最后 第三个假设是，尽管婴儿学习 物理世界在整个婴儿期保持不变，发生什么事件 了解什么年龄取决于一系列发展因素 包括婴儿的视觉、运动和表征能力。 本申请中提出的研究将建立在三个 刚才描述的假设。 计划进行五项研究。 的 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 影响支撑和碰撞事件的变量，而其他变量将 试图确定其他事件是否也有助于 核心事件和变量的描述。 第二行 研究将寻求进一步阐明 幼儿的定性和定量物理推理。 第三行 的研究将探讨代表性因素如何影响年龄， 婴儿开始理解不同类型的物理事件。 的 第四条研究路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，研究的第五条线将开始探索的性质， 引导婴儿识别核心事件和变量的经验。