OBJECT INDIVIDUATION AND EVENT REPRESENTATION IN INFANCY

最近的研究表明，婴儿至少可以利用两种来源。 对遮挡事件中涉及的对象进行个性化的信息：(A) 特征(即物体的形状、大小、颜色或图案)和(B) 物理(即关于物体移动的合法方式的知识和 交互)。然而，婴儿是否表现出这种能力取决于 在使用的任务上。当使用事件监视任务时(即，婴儿 必须判断事件的连续部分是否一致)， 婴儿在4.5岁前表现出使用特征信息的能力 几个月的年龄，和一些形式的物理信息到3.5个月 年龄(Aguiar&Baillarjo，1997；Wilcox&Baillarjo，1997)。在……里面 相反，当使用事件映射任务时(即，婴儿必须 检索一个事件的表示形式并将其与后续的 事件)，较大的婴儿经常失败(Wilcox&Baillarjo，正在出版；Xu& Carey，1996)。这项拟议的研究的目标是研究更多 密切关注映射问题，并识别婴儿 当他们尝试检索遮挡表示时参与 事件。 拟议的研究分为两个部分。第一 部分调查婴儿绘制闭塞事件图的能力 涉及两个特征截然不同的物体。这些实验解决了 婴儿如何组织和映射需要绑定的事件的问题 针对个人的功能。第二部分对婴儿进行调查 能够映射涉及两个相同对象的遮挡事件。 这些实验解决了两个问题：(A)婴儿利用 不同形式的物理知识，以使对象个人化和(B) 事件多义性及其对映射困难的影响。 总之，拟议的研究结果将提供新的见解 婴儿形成咬合事件表征的方式 婴儿在对他人进行推理时如何使用这些表征 体育赛事。研究结果也将为今后的研究提供方向 将重点研究事件表示法的研究 在婴儿期。

Recent research indicates that infants can draw on at least two sources of information to individuate objects involved in occlusion events: (a) featural (i.e., the shape, size, color, or pattern of an object) and (b) physical (i.e., knowledge about the lawful ways that objects move and interact). However, whether infants demonstrate this ability depends on the task used. When an event monitoring task is used (i.e., infants must judge whether successive portions of an event are consistent), infants demonstrate the ability to use featural information by 4.5 months of age, and some forms of physical information by 3.5 months of age (Aguiar & Baillargeon, 1997; Wilcox & Baillargeon, 1997). In contrast, when an event mapping task is used (i.e., infants must retrieve a representation of one event and compare it to a subsequent event), older infants often fail (Wilcox & Baillargeon, in press; Xu & Carey, 1996). The goal of the proposed research is to examine more closely the mapping problem and to identify the processes that infants engage in when they attempt to retrieve representations of occlusion events. The proposed research has been organized into two sections. The first section investigates infants ability to map occlusion events that involve two featurally distinct objects. These experiments address the question of how infants organize and map events that require binding features to individuals. The second section investigates infants ability to map occlusion events that involve two identical objects. These experiments address two issues: (a) infants ability to draw on different forms of physical knowledge to individuate objects and (b) event ambiguity and how it contributes to mapping difficulties. Together, the results of the proposed research will provide new insight into the way that infants form representations of occlusion events and how infants use these representations when reasoning about other physical events. The results will also provide direction for future research that will focus on the investigation of event representations in infancy.