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

描述(申请人提供)：儿童在充满人造物品的环境中长大。这些文物对我们的生活至关重要，不仅是作为工具，也是社会信息的无时无刻不在的来源：成年人仅根据他们拥有、携带和携带的文物，就可以快速准确地判断另一个人的特征、兴趣和社会背景。然而，尽管人工制品在成年后提供社会信息方面发挥了作用，但从人工制品进行社会推理的认知和发展基础仍未得到探索。本研究旨在研究典型发育期(TD)儿童和自闭症谱系障碍(ASD)儿童基于人造物的社会推理发展的特点。通过两个特定的目标，拟议的实验将探索关于(1)共同兴趣和(2)共同社会历史的推理的发展。在第一项研究中，TD和ASD参与者将被展示四个字符，每个人拥有一个神器。这些人工制品对的总体功能和知觉相似性将在 以确定儿童是否使用这种相似性来推断角色的共同兴趣，以及他们是否依赖于简单的启发式或更复杂的推理过程来这样做。第二个实验将检验一个更复杂的推论(共享的社会历史)，询问TD和ASD儿童是否推断当两个人巧合地创造了类似的非功能性(装饰性)特征时，社会传递已经发生。在这项研究中，参与者将被展示两个人创造了一个具有相同特征的艺术品。通过具体操纵该工具的功能是被视为装饰性的还是功能上的必要，这种设计将决定儿童是否以及何时得出关于社会传播和共享社会历史的结论，并通过高级推理过程而不是基于相似性的启发式方法来做到这一点。建议的研究是互补的，并为一个新的和重要的领域提供了一个低风险的切入点。每个具体目标将首先测试成人和TD儿童，然后将匹配的儿童样本与ASD进行比较，以确定ASD儿童的社交困难是否部分是由于基于人工产物的社会推理的缺陷。通过明确了解基于人工产物的推理过程并识别ASD人群中的缺陷，这项工作可能导致新的、有效的干预计划，以帮助ASD个人使用来自人工产物的信息来识别适当的社交伙伴和对话 共同感兴趣的话题。此外，拟议的研究将通过表征社会推理背后的认知过程，并通过打开关于儿童在日常生活中使用人工制品的社会线索的进一步问题的探索，将对我们对社会认知发展的理解做出重大贡献。

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.