The Role of Motion in the Animate/Inanimate Distinction

这项研究的目的是调查不同的运动模式在婴幼儿早期建构有生命和无生命概念中的作用。理解和预测这些类别成员的行为对人类的生存至关重要。然而，即使开始构建这种类别，婴儿也必须能够识别实体是一个类别或另一个类别的潜在成员。因为有生命的运动和无生命的运动是如此的不同，而且因为运动为有生命和无生命之间的潜在差异提供了直接的、感性的证据，运动的使用将为婴儿提供一个很好的起点，最终从这个起点上构建对这些概念的更成熟的理解。尽管这一提议相当受欢迎，但仍有待直接的经验检验。第一系列拟议的实验采用了注视的习惯化范式来研究 婴儿是否确实将独特的运动模式与现实世界中有生命和无生命的实体联系在一起。它进一步阐述了最有力地指定这些类别的特定运动特征和感知属性。在第二个系列中，我们也使用注视时间范式，调查婴儿是否将有生命的和无生命的作为不同的个体。最后，第三个系列通过探索幼儿对运动的使用来区分有生命的和无生命的，以及推断特定的感知、心理和生物属性的存在或不存在，来解决这些能力在生命的最初几年的发展。本研究有三个长期目标：1)考察基本概念建构的早期发展过程 没有生命。2)更广泛地阐明儿童在将物体识别为特定类别的实例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)作为正常儿童的方法论试点和基准，用来研究自闭症患者的这些类别的构建，对他们来说，识别和推理动画可能被证明是特别困难的。

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.