Perceptual Narrowing in Human Action Perception: Mechanisms and Functions

人类拥有复杂的社会认知：有助于理解和预测他人行为的心理过程。然而，这些过程都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，研究婴儿的行动知觉对于更广泛地理解早期社会认知至关重要。目前的建议旨在扩大我们对婴儿第一年行动知觉如何发展的认识。最近的研究表明，在一岁以内，婴儿在观察他人在世界上的行为时，会产生一种感知偏差：他们更关注他人如何抓住物体的信息，而不是其他方面的行动。本研究将探讨这种偏见形成的潜在因果机制：婴儿自我产生的运动经验。拟议的研究还将调查这种偏见的发展是否与婴儿行动感知和认知的改善有关。具体来说，他们将研究这种偏见是否与抓握感知的增强、目标理解和行动预测的改善以及行动感知过程中注意力灵活性的增加有关。这样的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关于物理和社会世界的大量信息。

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).