Infants Understanding of Goal Directed Action

描述（由申请人提供）：到第二年的生活孩子的学习在许多领域是介导的理解他人的意图。拟议的研究将调查这一基本知识体系的起源。在前一个资助期进行的工作揭示了婴儿对行动的有意结构的新兴敏感性：婴儿根据其对象导向结构分析某些行动，这种敏感性似乎是基于婴儿对现实世界代理人和行动的经验以及婴儿自己产生目标导向行动的经验的细节。这些结论与目前的方法相反，假设婴儿拥有关于意图的先天和抽象知识。相反，婴儿最初的行动知识似乎是局部的和有限的。鉴于这一出发点，发展将涉及从这些地方性的开端逐步构建更加抽象和一般的知识体系。拟议研究的目标是严格测试这一提议，从而深入了解婴儿对意向性行动结构变得敏感的过程。本研究将探讨两个一般性问题：（1）哪些经验有助于婴儿对目标导向的行动结构的敏感性？（2）婴儿在多大程度上概括了目标导向行为的信息？系列A将探讨自制动作对婴儿对观察到的动作的目标导向结构的敏感性的影响。系列B将研究两种被认为能诱导婴儿目标归因的观察证据。这些研究将为意向行动知识的产生提供新的见解。此外，他们可能会提供有关的发展障碍，从自闭症到行为障碍，其中涉及严重的社会推理缺陷的识别和补救的见解。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): By the second year of life children's learning across a number of domains is mediated by an understanding of others' intentions. The proposed studies will investigate the origins of this foundational system of knowledge. Work conducted in the prior funding period shed light on infants' emerging sensitivity to the intentional structure of action: infants analyze certain actions in terms of their object-directed structure, and this sensitivity seems to be grounded in the details of infants' experience with real-world agents and actions as well as infants' own experience producing goal-directed actions. These conclusions stand in contrast to current approaches assuming that infants possess innate and abstract knowledge about intentions. Rather, infants' initial action knowledge appears to be local and circumscribed. Given this starting point, development would involve the construction of progressively more abstract and general systems of knowledge from these local beginnings. The goal of the proposed studies is to rigorously test this proposal, and thereby gain insight to the processes by which infants become sensitive to the intentional structure of action. The studies will address 2 general questions: (1) Which experiences contribute to infants' sensitivity to the object-directed structure of action? and (2) How broadly do infants generalize information about object-directed action? Series A will explore the effects of self-produced action on infants' sensitivity to the object-directed structure of observed actions. Series B will investigate 2 kinds of observational evidence that have been argued to induce goal attribution in infants. These studies will provide new insights into the emergence of intentional action knowledge. In addition, they may provide insights relevant to the identification and remediation of developmental disorders, ranging from autism to conduct disorder, which involve severe deficits in social reasoning.