Infant's Approach to Learning About the Physical World

描述（由申请人提供）：传统上，研究人员认为婴儿对物理世界的了解很少。然而，随着更敏感的方法的出现，研究人员逐渐意识到，即使是年幼的婴儿也对身体事件有预期。这些早期期望的性质是什么？它们是如何随着时间的推移而发展的？这些问题在过去的20年里一直是Baillargeon研究计划的核心。 该应用程序旨在测试和扩展Baillargeon及其合作者最近开发的两个帐户：第一个帐户侧重于婴儿如何使用他们当前的物理知识来推理物理事件并预测其结果（推理帐户）;另一个帐户检查婴儿如何获得有关物理事件的新知识（学习帐户）。每个账户都做出了几个可测试的预测，这些预测将在下一个资助期进行调查。 拟议的研究建立在以前的资助期间进行的实验，并介绍了几个新的研究方向。拟议的实验将利用两种不同的方法，违反预期（VOE）和对象操作（OM）的方法。总共有18个项目计划，分为七个相互关联的研究领域。这些行检查：（1）事件类别的形成和使用;（2）个体事件类别中变量的获得;（3）婴儿对不同类别事件推理的早期能力;（4）提示婴儿对事件类别中的新变量进行推理，通过暴露于不同类别的事件，其中该变量已经被识别;（5）事件类别知识对幼儿觉察变量信息中隐性变化能力的影响（在实验室内外）通过暴露于事件类别中的适当事件，在事件类别中产生新变量;（7）抽象客体范畴的形成和使用，即惰性客体和自动客体。 这项研究将帮助我们更好地了解婴儿如何推理和学习物理事件，因此将为我们提供婴儿期认知发展这一方面的概念性更丰富和更详细的图片。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Traditionally, researchers assumed that infants understand very little about the physical world. With the advent of more sensitive methods, however, investigators have come to realize that even young infants possess expectations about physical events. What is the nature of these early expectations, and how do they develop over time? These questions have been at the core of Baillargeon's research program for the past 20 years. This application seeks to test and extend two accounts recently developed by Baillargeon and her collaborators: the first focuses on how infants use their current physical knowledge to reason about physical events and predict their outcomes (reasoning account); the other account examines how infants attain new knowledge about physical events (learning account). Each account makes several testable predictions that will be investigated in the next grant period. The proposed research builds on experiments conducted in the previous grant periods, and also introduces several new research directions. The proposed experiments will make use of two different methods, the violation-of-expectation (VOE) and the object-manipulation (OM) method. In all, 18 projects are planned, organized into seven, inter-related lines of research. These lines examine: (1) the formation and use of event categories; (2) the acquisition of variables in individual event categories; (3) early competencies in infants' reasoning about events from different categories; (4) cueing infants to reason about a new variable in an event category, through exposure to an event from a different category in which this variable has already been identified; (5) effects of event category knowledge on infants' ability to detect surreptitious changes in variable information; (6) teaching infants (in or out of the laboratory) a new variable in an event category, through exposure to appropriate events from the category; and finally (7) the formation and use of abstract object categories, namely, inert and self-moving objects. The proposed research will help us better understand how infants reason and learn about physical events, and as such will give us a conceptually richer and more detailed picture of this facet of cognitive development in infancy.