The Role of Motion in the Animate/Inanimate Distinction

本研究的目的是探讨婴幼儿在早期建构有生命和无生命概念时，不同的运动模式所扮演的角色。理解和预测这些类别成员的行为对人类生存至关重要。然而，即使开始构建这样的类别，婴儿也必须能够将实体识别为一个类别或另一个类别的潜在成员。因为有生命的和无生命的运动是如此不同，因为运动提供了直接的，知觉的证据之间的潜在差异animates和inanimates，使用运动将提供一个很好的起点，从最终构建一个更成熟的理解这些概念。虽然这一建议很受欢迎，但仍有待直接的经验检验。第一系列的实验采用了习惯化的观察范式来研究 婴儿是否确实将不同的运动模式与现实世界的有生命和无生命实体相关联。它进一步解决了最有力地指定这些类别的特定运动特性和感知属性。在第二个系列中，我们调查婴儿是否代表animates和inanimates作为不同的个人，也使用了看时间范式。最后，第三个系列探讨了这些能力的发展在生命的第一年，通过探索幼儿使用运动来区分有生命的和无生命的，并推断存在或不存在特定的知觉，心理和生物特性。本研究有三个长期目标：1）考察动物基本概念建构的早期发展过程， 没有生命2)更普遍地阐明儿童在识别作为特定类别实例的物体时对知觉特征的敏感性与他们对这些类别的概念理解之间的关系。3)作为一个方法的试点和基准与正常的儿童，以调查这些类别的建设在自闭症患者，对他们的识别和推理的动画可能证明特别有问题。

The goal of the proposed research is to investigate the role of differential motion patterns in the early construction by infants and young children of the concepts animate and inanimate. Understanding and predicting the behavior of members of these categories is crucial to human survival. However, even to begin the construction of such categories, infants must be able to identify entities as potential members of one class or the other. Because animate and inanimate motion are so distinct and because motion provides direct, perceptual evidence of underlying differences between animates and inanimates, the use of motion would provide infants with an excellent starting point from which eventually to construct a more mature understanding of these concepts. Although quite popular, this proposal remains to be directly empirically tested. The first series of proposed experiments employs a habituation of looking paradigm to investigate whether infants have indeed associated distinctive motion patterns with real-world animate and inanimate entities. It further addresses the particular motion characteristics and perceptual properties that most powerfully specify these categories. In the second series, we investigate whether infants represent animates and inanimates as distinct individuals, also using a looking time paradigm. Finally, the third series addresses the development of these abilities over the first years of life by probing the use of motion by young children both to distinguish animates from inanimates and also to infer the presence or absence of specific perceptual, psychological, and biological properties. This research has 3 long-term objectives: 1) To investigate the early developmental course of the construction of the fundamental concepts animate and inanimate. 2) To shed light more generally on the relation between children's sensitivity to perceptual features in the identification of objects as instances of specific categories and their conceptual understanding of these categories. 3) To serve as a methodological pilot and benchmark with normal children with which to investigate the construction of these categories in autistic individuals, for whom the identification of and reasoning about animates might prove particularly problematic.