REPRESENTATIONS YIELDING INFANT TASK-DEPENDENT BEHAVIOR

本研究的主要目的是促进对婴儿隐藏对象的任务依赖行为的表征的理解。婴儿可能会表现出早熟或在几乎任何能力上的限制，这取决于他们所接受的任务。例如，在视觉习惯研究中，3.5个月大的婴儿对隐藏物体的持续存在表现出明显的敏感性，但婴儿在9个月左右无法手动搜索遮挡物隐藏的物体。5个月大的婴儿也会在黑暗中伸手去拿东西。这种任务依赖行为可以从很多方面来解释，导致许多关于婴儿所知道的相互矛盾的说法，从非常小的婴儿拥有物体永久存在的概念到大得多的婴儿对隐藏的物体一无所知。本项目通过关注以下问题来解决这一争论：先天的和偶然的任务因素如何影响婴儿的任务依赖行为？2. 不同类型的表征如何影响婴儿的任务依赖行为？3. 分级表征如何影响婴儿的任务依赖行为？该项目的主要方法是详细分析婴儿对物体的反应，这些物体出现后又从视野中隐藏起来，跨越三种范式：视觉习惯，在黑暗中伸手，在可见遮挡物下搜索。这些研究的结果将阐明各种因素对婴儿在不同任务中使用表征的影响。通过这种方式，提出的工作提供了一个连贯的程序，以促进我们对影响婴儿任务依赖行为的因素的理解——这是表征婴儿表征本质的重要一步，反过来又为理论及其在典型和特殊人群中的应用提供了信息。

The primary goal of this research is to advance understanding of the representations underlying 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 search for objects hidden by occluders through around 9 months. And, infants as young as 5 months reach for objects in the dark. Such task-dependent behaviors can be interpreted in many ways, resulting in numerous contradictory claims about what infants know, from very young infants possessing a concept of object permanence to much older infants representing nothing about hidden objects. This project addresses this debate by focusing on the following questions: 1. How do inherent and incidental task factors contribute to infants' task- dependent behavior? 2. How do distinct types of representations contribute to infants' task- dependent behavior? 3. How do graded representations contribute to infants' task-dependent behavior? The primary methodology for this project is the detailed analysis of infants' response to objects that are presented and then hidden from view, across three paradigms: visual habituation, reaching in the dark, and searching under visible occluders. Findings from these studies will illuminate the influence of a variety of factors in the representations infants use across different tasks. In this way, the proposed work provides a coherent program for advancing our understanding of the factors contributing to infants' task-dependent behavior--an essential step toward characterizing the nature of infants' representations, and in turn informing theory and its application to both typical and special populations.