REPRESENTATIONS YIELDING INFANT TASK-DEPENDENT BEHAVIOR

本研究的主要目的是促进对婴儿隐藏物体任务依赖行为表征的理解。根据分配给他们的任务，婴儿可能会显得早熟或几乎任何能力都有限。例如，在视觉习惯化研究中，年仅3.5个月的婴儿对隐藏物体的持续存在表现出明显的敏感性，但婴儿在大约9个月的时间里无法手动寻找被遮盖器隐藏的物体。而且，只有5个月大的婴儿会在黑暗中伸手拿东西。这种依赖任务的行为可以用多种方式解释，导致关于婴儿知道什么的许多相互矛盾的说法，从非常小的婴儿拥有物体永久性的概念，到年长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场争论：1.固有的和附带的任务因素如何促进婴儿的任务依赖行为？2.不同类型的表征如何促进婴儿的任务依赖行为？3.分级表征如何促进婴儿的任务依赖行为？这个项目的主要方法是详细分析婴儿对呈现然后隐藏在视线中的对象的反应，跨越三种范式：视觉习惯化，在黑暗中到达，以及在可见的遮挡下搜索。这些研究的结果将阐明婴儿在不同任务中使用表征的各种因素的影响。通过这种方式，拟议的工作提供了一个连贯的计划，以促进我们对导致婴儿任务依赖行为的因素的理解--这是表征婴儿表征的性质的关键一步，并反过来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.