Perceptual Narrowing in Human Action Perception: Mechanisms and Functions

人类拥有复杂的社会认知：帮助理解和预测他人行为的心理过程。然而，这些过程围绕着一种核心能力，即将他人的行为视为刺激。因此，从发展的角度来看，对婴儿动作知觉的研究对于更广泛地理解早期社会认知是至关重要的。目前的建议旨在扩大我们对行动知觉在婴儿期第一年是如何发展的了解。最近的研究表明，在第一年内，婴儿在观察别人在世界上的行为时会产生一种知觉偏差：他们更关注关于其他人是如何抓住物体而不是其他动作维度的信息。这项拟议研究中的研究将调查这种偏见发展的一个潜在的因果机制：婴儿的自我产生的运动经验。拟议中的研究还将调查这种偏见的发展是否与婴儿行动知觉和认知的改善有关。具体地说，他们将研究这种偏见是否与掌握知觉的增强、目标理解和行动预测的改善以及行动知觉中注意力灵活性的增加有关。这些发展将提高行动感知的效率，这也将有利于婴儿的整体认知发展，因为婴儿通过观察他人获得了关于物理和社会世界的大量信息。 这项研究对知觉发展的研究具有广泛的意义，因为行动知觉的发展可能与其他领域的发展有相似之处，如言语或面孔知觉。它还具体介绍了早期社会认知理论，这些理论在描述驱动目标理解和行动预测发展的潜在机制方面缺乏特殊性；目前的建议将评估婴儿的自我生成经验如何发挥这种机制的作用。最后，由于这项研究将阐明最终为更复杂的社会认知成就(例如心理理论)奠定基础的发展过程，它也对社会认知受损的发展障碍(例如自闭症)具有影响。

Humans possess sophisticated social cognition: mental processes that aid in understanding and predicting the behaviours of other individuals. These processes, however, revolve around a central ability to perceive the actions of others as stimuli. Thus, from a developmental perspective, the study of infants' action perception is critical to understanding early social cognition more broadly. The current proposal seeks to expand our knowledge of how action perception develops over the first year of infancy. Recent work suggests that within the first year infants develop a perceptual bias when they observe others acting in the world: they pay more attention to information about how other people grasp objects over other dimensions of action. The studies in the proposed research will investigate a potential causal mechanism in the development of this bias: infants' self-generated motor experience. The proposed studies will also investigate whether the development of this bias is tied to improvements in infants' action perception and cognition. Specifically, they will examine whether this bias is related to enhancements in grasping perception, improvements in goal understanding and action prediction, and increases in the flexibility of attention during action perception. Such developments would improve the efficiency of action perception, which would also benefit infants' overall cognitive development, as infants acquire considerable information about the physical and social world through their observation of others. This research has broad implications for the study of perceptual development, as the development of action perception may share similarities with development in other domains, such as speech or face perception. It also specifically informs theories of early social cognition, which lack specificity in describing the underlying mechanisms that drive the development of goal understanding and action prediction; the current proposal will evaluate how infants' self-generated experience can act as such a mechanism. Finally, as this research will shed light on developmental processes that ultimately set the stage for more complex social cognitive achievements (e.g., theory of mind), it also has implications for developmental disorders in which social cognition is impaired (e.g., autism).