Origins of Object Knowledge

描述（由申请人提供）：12个实验研究人类婴儿对部分遮挡表面统一性的感知的早期发展。实验集中在个体发育过程中的一段时间，在这段时间里，可能有证据表明婴儿对指定物体属性的信息具有视觉敏感性，但感知遮挡的能力有限，目的是观察婴儿将刺激的可见部分组装成连贯整体的实时过程。该方法认为，对运动和方向信息的敏感性的开始，眼动系统的发展，以及对遮挡和解除遮挡的物体的观察经验，在物体感知的个体发生中起着直接的基础作用。也就是说，有一个假设的时期，2到4个月大，在此期间婴儿开始使用新出现的视觉技能来准确地感知物体。实验遵循类似的策略：探索个体和群体在基本视觉处理技能和部分遮挡表面统一性感知方面的差异。通过两种方法来评估婴儿的感知能力：(a)记录眼球运动，以衡量重要视觉信息获取的改善程度；(b)习惯化/不习惯化，以确定对物体统一性的感知以及确定对可用视觉信息的敏感程度。这种方法所提供的对个体差异的详细分析有望为视觉技能和客体知识的出现提供非常敏感的测量方法。本研究的短期目标是在经典的先天-后天辩论的背景下阐明基本的发育机制。长期目标是阐明更大的问题，即人类如何获取和构建知识，以及感知技能如何影响知识获取和结构。在未来，这样的理解可能有助于制定诊断和治疗一些发育障碍。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Twelve experiments investigate the early development, in human infants, of perception of the unity of partly occluded surfaces. The experiments focus on a time during ontogeny when there may be evidence of visual sensitivity to information specifying object properties, but limited ability to perceive occlusion, with the goal of observing real-time processes by which the infant assembles visible parts of a stimulus into a coherent whole. This approach stipulates that onset of sensitivity to motion and orientation information, development of the oculomotor system, and experience viewing objects undergoing occlusion and disocclusion, play a direct, foundational role in the ontogeny of object perception. That is, there is an hypothesized period, 2 to 4 months of age, during which infants come to use newly-emerged visual skills to perceive objects accurately. The experiments follow a similar strategy: explorations of individual and group differences in both basic visual processing skills and perception of the unity of partly occluded surfaces. Infant perception is assessed with two methods: (a) recording of eye movements, to measure improvements in pickup of important visual .information, and (b) habituation/dishabituation, to ascertain perception of object unity as well as to determine the extent of sensitivity to available visual information. It is expected that the detailed analysis of individual differences afforded by this approach provide the opportunity for exceptionally sensitive measures of the emergence of visual skills and object knowledge. The short-term objectives of the present proposal are to elucidate fundamental developmental mechanisms in the context of the classic nature-nurture debate. The long-term goals are to shed light on the larger question of how knowledge is acquired and structured in the human, and how perceptual skills impact knowledge acquisition and structure. In the future, such understanding may aid in the formulation of diagnostics and treatments for some developmental disorders.