Social Information Processing Speed and Social Competence in Infants

 描述(由申请者提供)：人类儿童从他们与社会伙伴的互动中学到了很多东西，包括语言、文化规范和文物使用以及其他相关的社会认知能力。向他人学习需要学习者至少具备两种能力--将他人的行为表现为有意的能力和非常迅速地实时使用这些知识的能力。在出生的第一年，来自被动实验方法的综合证据表明，言语前婴儿能够理解他人的意图和目标(Guajardo&Woodward，2004；Woodward，1998,1999)；然而，在需要快速反应的自然主义互动中，这些婴儿对他人的知识可能并不成熟。在12到24个月大时，婴儿在细粒度的社会互动能力(社会能力)方面表现出越来越强的技能，这一发展得到了来自自然主义社会互动的经验证据的支持(Bakeman&Adamson，1984；Buttelmann，Carpenter和Tomasello，2009)。一种可能性是，1岁和2岁之间社交能力的差异主要不是由婴儿对他人意图的了解推动的，而是因为婴儿在社交互动中变得更善于迅速吸收这种知识(目标预测速度)，以对他人做出适当的反应。目前的提案将考察18个月大的婴儿在整合他人社会知识(社交能力)方面的熟练程度，以及他们的反应速度(目标预测速度)是否有助于他们在第二年明显表现出的社交技能的发展。将通过一系列任务来衡量婴儿的社交能力，这些任务旨在引发以下行为：帮助、分享、共同关注、接受观点和一般认知能力。他们在这些任务中的表现将与我们实验室开发的目标预测速度测量相关联。在这一衡量标准中，婴儿迅速收集关于过去事件的信息以预测一个人未来行为的能力，如 通过他们的潜伏期来衡量推出基于目标的预测性注视，将使用T60 XL Tobii眼球跟踪系统在预期的外观范例中进行检查。因此，这一建议将通过将婴儿在生成基于目标的预测时的速度与他们在社交能力测量上的表现联系起来，提供一种新的社交能力衡量标准。与NICHD确保所有儿童都有机会充分发挥其健康和富有成效的生活潜力的使命相一致，目前的项目将揭示婴儿社交能力的发展，这是一种包括社交、认知和行为技能的多维能力，使婴儿能够有效地驾驭他们的社交世界。

 DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Human children learn a great deal from their interactions with social partners, including language, cultural norms, and artifact use among other relevant social cognitive abilities. Learning from others requires at least two kinds of abilities in the learner - the ability to represent others' actions as intentional and the ability o use this knowledge very quickly in real time. In the first year of life, converging evidence from passive experimental methods suggests that preverbal infants have an understanding of others' intentions and goals (Guajardo & Woodward, 2004; Woodward, 1998, 1999); however, these same infants may not appear as sophisticated in their knowledge of others during naturalistic interactions that require fast responses. Between 12 and 24 months of age, infants show increasing skill in fine-grained social interactive abilities (social competence), which is a development supported by empirical evidence from naturalistic social interactions (Bakeman & Adamson, 1984; Buttelmann, Carpenter, & Tomasello, 2009). One possibility is that this difference in social competence between years 1 and 2 is not driven primarily by infants' knowledge of the intentions of others; rather, it is that infants become more adept at recruiting this knowledge quickly (Goal Prediction Speed) during social interactions to produce appropriate responses to others. The current proposal will examine how skilled 18-month-old infants are at integrating social knowledge about others (social competence) and whether their speed in responding (Goal Prediction Speed) aids in their development of social skills that are evident in the second year of life. Infants' social competence will be measured with a series of tasks designed to elicit the following behaviors: helping; sharing; joint attention; perspective-taking; and general cognitive ability. Their performance on these tasks will be correlated with a Goal Prediction Speed measure that has been developed within our lab. In this measure, infants' ability to rapidly recruit information about a past event to predict a person's future behavior, as measured through their latency to launch a goal-based predictive fixation, will be examined in an anticipatory looking paradigm using a T60 XL Tobii eye-tracking system. Thus, this proposal will provide a novel measure of social competence by correlating infants' speed when generating goal-based predictions with their performance on social competence measures. Consistent with NICHD's mission of ensuring that all children have the opportunity to achieve their full potential for healthy and productive lives, the current project will shed light on infans' developing social competence, a multidimensional ability that encompasses social, cognitive, and behavioral skills that allow infants to effectively navigate their social world.