Artifacts as Windows to Other Minds: Social Reasoning In Typical and ASD Children

描述（由申请人提供）：儿童在充满人造物品的环境中长大。这些人工制品对我们的生活至关重要，不仅是作为工具，而且是无处不在的社会信息来源：成年人仅仅从他们拥有、穿着和携带的人工制品中就能对另一个人的特征、兴趣和社会关系形成快速而准确的判断。然而，尽管人工制品在成年期提供社会信息方面发挥着重要作用，但人工制品的社会推理的认知和发展基础仍未得到探索。本研究旨在描述典型发育（TD）儿童和自闭症谱系障碍（ASD）儿童基于人工制品的社会推理的发展特征。通过两个具体目标，提出的实验将探索关于(1)共同利益和(2)基于人工制品的共同社会历史的推理发展。在第一项研究中，TD和ASD参与者将看到四个角色，以及每个角色拥有的一件工艺品。对这些工件的整体功能和感知相似性将被操纵

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Children grow up in environments saturated by human-made objects. These artifacts are crucial to our lives not only as tools, but also as an ever-present source of social information: Adults form quick and accurate judgments about another person's traits, interests, and social affiliations simply from the artifacts they own, wea and carry. Yet in spite of the role artifacts play in providing social information in adulthood, th cognitive and developmental bases of social reasoning from artifacts remain unexplored. The proposed research aims to characterize the development of artifact-based social reasoning, in both typically-developing (TD) children and children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). Through two specific aims, the proposed experiments will explore the development of reasoning about (1) shared interests and (2) shared social history on the basis of artifacts. In the first study, TD and ASD participants will be shown four characters, and an artifact owned by each. The overall functional and perceptual similarity of pairs of these artifacts will be manipulated in order to determine whether children use such similarity to infer shared interests of the characters, and whether they rely on simple heuristics or more complex reasoning processes to do so. A second experiment will examine a more complex inference (shared social history), asking whether TD and ASD children infer that social transmission has occurred when two individuals coincidentally create similar non-functional (decorative) features. In this study, participants will be shown that two people created an artifact with the same features. By specifically manipulating whether the tool's features are seen as decorative or functionally necessary, this design will determine whether and when children draw conclusions about social transmission and shared social history, and do so through high-level reasoning processes, not similarity-based heuristics. The proposed studies are complementary, and provide a low-risk entry point into a novel and important domain. Each specific aim will first test adults and TD children, then compare a matched sample of children with ASD, to determine whether the social difficulties of children with ASD may be in part due to deficits in artifact-based social reasoning By explicitly understanding artifact-based reasoning processes and identifying deficits in the ASD population, this work may lead to new, effective intervention programs to help ASD individuals use information from artifacts to identify appropriate social partners and conversation topics of mutual interest. In addition, the proposed studies will make a significant contribution t our understanding of social cognitive development by characterizing the cognitive processes underlying this social reasoning, and by opening for exploration further questions regarding children's use of social cues from artifacts in their everyday lives.