Infant's Approach to Learning About the Physical World

描述(由申请者提供)：传统上，研究人员认为婴儿对物理世界了解很少。然而，随着更灵敏的方法的出现，研究人员开始意识到，即使是年幼的婴儿也对身体事件有期望。这些早期预期的性质是什么，它们是如何随着时间的推移而发展的？在过去的20年里，这些问题一直是贝拉金研究计划的核心。 这个应用程序试图测试和扩展Baillarjo和她的合作者最近开发的两个帐户：第一个帐户专注于婴儿如何使用他们当前的物理知识来推理物理事件并预测其结果(推理帐户)；另一个帐户检查婴儿如何获得关于物理事件的新知识(学习帐户)。每个账户都做出了几个可测试的预测，这些预测将在下一个赠款期间进行调查。 这项拟议的研究建立在前几个赠款时期进行的实验的基础上，并引入了几个新的研究方向。建议的实验将使用两种不同的方法，违反预期(VOE)和对象操纵(OM)方法。总共计划了18个项目，将其组织成7个相互关联的研究方向。这些线条考察：(1)事件类别的形成和使用；(2)单个事件类别中变量的获得；(3)婴儿对不同类别事件的早期推理能力；(4)通过暴露于已经识别该变量的不同类别的事件，提示婴儿对该事件类别中的新变量进行推理；(5)事件类别知识对婴儿发现变量信息中秘密变化的能力的影响；(6)通过接触来自该类别的适当事件，教婴儿(实验室内或实验室外)事件类别中的新变量；(7)抽象客体范畴的形成和使用，即惰性客体和自动客体。 拟议中的研究将帮助我们更好地理解婴儿是如何推理和学习身体事件的，因此将给我们一个概念上更丰富、更详细的婴儿认知发展这一方面的图景。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Traditionally, researchers assumed that infants understand very little about the physical world. With the advent of more sensitive methods, however, investigators have come to realize that even young infants possess expectations about physical events. What is the nature of these early expectations, and how do they develop over time? These questions have been at the core of Baillargeon's research program for the past 20 years. This application seeks to test and extend two accounts recently developed by Baillargeon and her collaborators: the first focuses on how infants use their current physical knowledge to reason about physical events and predict their outcomes (reasoning account); the other account examines how infants attain new knowledge about physical events (learning account). Each account makes several testable predictions that will be investigated in the next grant period. The proposed research builds on experiments conducted in the previous grant periods, and also introduces several new research directions. The proposed experiments will make use of two different methods, the violation-of-expectation (VOE) and the object-manipulation (OM) method. In all, 18 projects are planned, organized into seven, inter-related lines of research. These lines examine: (1) the formation and use of event categories; (2) the acquisition of variables in individual event categories; (3) early competencies in infants' reasoning about events from different categories; (4) cueing infants to reason about a new variable in an event category, through exposure to an event from a different category in which this variable has already been identified; (5) effects of event category knowledge on infants' ability to detect surreptitious changes in variable information; (6) teaching infants (in or out of the laboratory) a new variable in an event category, through exposure to appropriate events from the category; and finally (7) the formation and use of abstract object categories, namely, inert and self-moving objects. The proposed research will help us better understand how infants reason and learn about physical events, and as such will give us a conceptually richer and more detailed picture of this facet of cognitive development in infancy.