Objects or agents: Early development of knowledge about human hands

人们早就知道，婴儿对人脸特别感兴趣，我们最近的ARC资助的工作表明，婴儿对人脸的认识早在对整个人体形状的认识之前就出现了。像脸一样，手通常是婴儿与同伴或照顾者之间行动和交流的焦点。 因此，拟议的研究的目的是调查人类的手是否类似于面部高度突出，并在婴儿期进行早熟学习。 拟议中的研究将检验这一假设，并将为新技术奠定基础，这些新技术可以促进幼儿的社会理解，这些幼儿的发育障碍使面对面的互动令人厌恶。

It has long been known that human faces are especially interesting to infants, and our recent ARC-funded work demonstrated that infants' knowledge about human faces emerges long before knowledge of the whole human body shape. Like faces, hands are often the focus of action and communication between infants and their peers or caregivers. The purpose of the proposed studies is therefore to investigate whether human hands are similar to faces in being highly salient and subject to precocious learning in infancy. The proposed studies will test this hypothesis, and will lay the foundation for new techniques that could foster improved social understanding in young children whose developmental disorders make face-to-face interaction aversive.