Action anticipation in infants

人类是一个高度社会化的物种，这一事实甚至在发展的最早阶段就很明显。婴儿非常关注他们的社会伙伴，并与他们进行认知互动。特别是，过去十年的研究表明，幼儿认为他人的行为不是纯粹的身体运动，而是由人的目标和注意力状态构成的行动。这种对行动目标结构的敏感性是人类经验的基础，对社会和认知发展至关重要。然而，目前的研究结果并没有告诉我们婴儿是否以及如何招募这种对他人目标的敏感性，以便在真实的时间内预测他们的行动。 预测他人的目标导向行动对于许多形式的社会协调至关重要，包括一对一的社会互动，协作活动和沟通。该项目将通过调查婴儿根据他或她先前的目标和注意力集中的信息在视觉上预测一个人的下一步行动的能力来解决文献中的这一差距。通过使用远程眼动跟踪系统记录婴儿在视频监视器上观看动作时的视线转移，这些研究将调查不同年龄的婴儿可以产生动作预测的情况范围。此外，这些研究还将探索两个潜在的贡献者，以发展行动预测-婴儿自己的经验，产生结构良好的行动和婴儿的敏感性语言信息的一个人的目标。 通过这种方式，该项目将记录婴儿期行为预测的出现，并提供对婴儿这种能力的发展过程的见解。该项目将为婴儿社会能力的关键和基本未研究的方面提供基础见解。更广泛地说，这项工作将告知我们对社会，认知和语言发展的理解，因为它将揭示社会认知过程，巩固幼儿在这些领域的社会学习。这些实验还将为评估婴儿的社会信息处理开发新的研究方法。由于这些研究中开发的眼动追踪方法也可以适用于更广泛的人群，因此这项研究将为跨年龄、人群和可能的物种的比较工作奠定基础。这些眼动追踪方法可能对那些对口头指令反应能力有限的参与者特别有用，例如自闭症患者。通过阐明社会认知的一个重要方面的早期发展，这项工作也可能产生重要的见解，以了解临床疾病，涉及社会推理，社会注意力和对他人行为的在线解释（例如，自闭症和行为障碍）的缺陷。

Humans are an intensely social species, and this fact is evident even at the earliest points in development. Infants are highly attentive to their social partners and cognitively engaged with them. In particular, research over the last decade has revealed that young infants view others' behavior not as purely physical movements but rather as actions structured by the person's goals and states of attention. This sensitivity to the goal structure of action is fundamental to human experience and critical for social and cognitive development. However, current findings do not tell us whether and how infants recruit this sensitivity to others' goals in order to predict their actions in real time. Anticipating others' goal-directed actions is essential for many forms of social coordination, including one-on-one social interactions, collaborative activities and communication. This project will address this gap in the literature by investigating infants' ability to visually predict a person's next action based on information about his or her prior goals and focus of attention. By using a remote eye-tracking system to record infants' gaze shifts as they view actions on a video monitor, the studies will investigate the range of situations in which infants of different ages can generate action predictions. In addition, the studies will explore two potential contributors to the development of action prediction -- infants' own experience producing well-structured actions and infants' sensitivity to linguistic information about a person's goals. In this way, the project will both document the emergence of action prediction during infancy and provide insights into the developmental processes that contribute to this ability in infants.This project will provide foundational insights into a critical and largely unstudied aspect of social competence in infants. More broadly, this work will inform our understanding of social, cognitive and linguistic development because it will shed light on the social-cognitive processes that undergird young children's social learning in these domains. The experiments will also develop new research methods for assessing social information processing in infants. Because the eye-tracking methods developed in these studies can also be adapted for use with broader populations, this research will lay the foundation for comparative work across ages, populations, and possibly species. These eye-tracking methods may be particularly useful in participants who have limited abilities to respond to verbal instructions, such as individuals with autism. By elucidating the early development of an important aspect of social cognition, this work may also yield important insights into understanding clinical disorders that involve deficits in social reasoning, social attention, and the on-line interpretation of others' actions (for example, autism and conduct disorder).