INFANTS UNDERSTANDING OF GOAL DIRECTED ACTION

描述：这项拟议的研究将探索婴儿的发育 对其他人采取的行动的回应。这些实验都利用了 视觉习惯化方法。在初步研究中，调查员 已经发现，在9岁和5个月大(程度可能较小)时， 婴儿有选择地编码用手抓取动作的目标； 其他操作，如指向对象或使用 没有选择性地编码，动作也不是由 无生命的物体(例如，杆子或起重机)。进一步的结果显示， 12个月大的婴儿确实会选择性地编码指点动作。这些结果 建议幼儿有一套知识体系来指导他们的 关于人类行为的推理，人类行为在第一个阶段经历了发展 年。拟议的实验探索了这一现象的性质和发展。 知识。他们探索：1)婴儿对各种行为的反应 和相应的无生命功能关系；2)婴儿的能力 将行为归类为目标导向或非目标；3)婴儿的整合能力 来自同时行动的信息；最后，4)婴儿的反应 To Means-End序列涉及两个不同的操作 物体。总而言之，这些实验应该有助于我们的 对早期心理学婴儿期根源的理解 知识。

DESCRIPTION: The proposed research will explore the development of infants' responses to actions carried out by others. The experiments all make use of the visual-habituation method. In preliminary research, the investigator has found that, at 9 and (to perhaps a lesser extent) 5 months of age, infants selectively encode the goal of grasping actions performed by a hand; other actions, such as pointing to an object, or touching an object with the back of the hand, are not selectively encoded, nor are actions performed by inanimate objects (e.g., a rod or crane). Further results showed that 12-month-old infants do selectively encode pointing actions. These results suggest that young infants have a system of knowledge to guide their reasoning about human actions, which undergoes development during the first year. The proposed experiments explore the nature and development of this knowledge. They explore: 1) infants' responses to a wide range of actions and corresponding inanimate functional relations; 2) infants' ability to categorize actions as goal-directed or not; 3) infants' ability to integrate information from simultaneous actions; and, finally, 4) infants' responses to means-end sequences involving two distinct actions on two distinct objects. Taken together, these experiments should contribute to our understanding of what are the roots in infancy of early psychological knowledge.