Figure-ground segregation and self-sitting in infancy

描述（由申请人提供）：隔离是必不可少的，并从有效感知环境的基础上扮演一个人的形象中的对象。伸手去拿物体，在杂乱的环境中导航，以及准确地感知物体的深度排列，都取决于将一些区域感知为图形，将其他区域感知为背景。因此，图形-背景（FG）分离对婴儿期正常的认知和知觉发展有影响。尽管FG隔离对婴儿认知发展的重要性，但没有研究直接调查婴儿对FG分配线索的敏感性。这是拟议工作的目标之一。FG分配的线索是婴儿在感知和作用于视觉世界时可以学习的知觉线索。这项工作的另一个目标是了解运动成绩如何为婴儿提供学习这种技能的新机会。初步研究结果表明，自坐的出现（一种运动成就，对婴儿熟练地触及物体产生影响）与婴儿使用对称性作为FG隔离的提示之间存在关系。建议的研究计划将透过以下方法进一步探讨两者的关系：（1）改善婴儿坐姿能力的评估和分类（2）评价幼儿使用不同的提示、FG分离、下区与自我坐姿能力的关系（3）建立了一个新的实验程序，直接检验了伸手与幼儿FG分离的关系（4）纵向评估自我坐姿和FG分离能力，以确定这两种能力的发展时间过程（实验4）。因此，拟议的实验将大大增加我们对婴儿视觉感知的一个方面的理解，这对他们学习和有效地与环境互动的能力有影响，这些实验将提供对婴儿视觉感知这方面发展变化的机制的深入理解。

Description (provided by applicant): Segregating is essential for and acting the objects in one's figures from grounds effectively perceiving upon environment. Reaching for and grasping objects, navigating a cluttered environment, and accurately perceiving how objects are arranged in depth all depend on the perception of some regions as figure and others as background. Therefore, figure-ground (FG) segregation has implications for normal cognitive and perceptual development in infancy. Despite the importance of FG segregation for infants' cognitive development, no research has directly investigated infants' sensitivity to cues to FG assignment. This is one goal of the proposed work. Cues to FG assignment are perceptual regularities that infants can learn as they perceive and act on the visual world. Another goal of the proposed work is to understand how motor achievements provides new opportunities for infants to learn such regularities. Preliminary findings indicate a relation between the emergence of self-sitting, a motor achievement that has consequences for infants' skilled reaching for objects, and infants' use of symmetry as a cue to FG segregation. The proposed project will further explore this relation by (1) refining the assessment and classification of infants' sitting abilities (Experiment 1), (2) evaluating the relation between self-sitting abilities and infants' use of a different cue to, FG segregation, lower region (Experiment 2), (3) developing a new procedure to directly test the relation between reaching and infants' FG segregation (Experiment 3), and (4) longitudinally assessing both selfsitting and FG segregation abilities to determine the developmental time courses of these two abilities (Experiment 4). The proposed experiments, therefore, will add significantly to our understanding of an aspect of infants' visual perception that has consequences for their abilities to learn about and effectively interact with the environment, and these experiments will provide a deep understanding in the mechanisms that underlie developmental changes in this aspect of infants' visual perception.