Infants Understanding of Goal Directed Action

描述(由申请者提供)：到第二年，儿童在许多领域的学习是通过理解他人的意图来实现的。拟议的研究将调查这一基础性知识体系的起源。在之前的资助期间进行的工作揭示了婴儿对行动的有意结构的新出现的敏感性：婴儿根据其面向对象的结构来分析某些行为，这种敏感性似乎植根于婴儿与现实世界中的动因和行动的细节以及婴儿自己产生目标定向行动的经验。这些结论与目前的方法形成鲜明对比，这些方法假定婴儿拥有关于意图的与生俱来的抽象知识。相反，婴儿的初始动作知识似乎是局部的和受限的。鉴于这一起点，发展将涉及从这些地方开始逐步建立更抽象和一般的知识体系。拟议研究的目标是严格测试这一建议，从而洞察婴儿对行为的有意结构变得敏感的过程。这些研究将解决两个一般性问题：(1)哪些经历有助于婴儿对以对象为导向的行动结构的敏感性？(2)婴儿在多大程度上概括了关于对象定向行为的信息？系列A将探索自我产生的动作对婴儿对观察到的动作的客体导向结构的敏感性的影响。B系列将调查两种已被证明能诱导婴儿目标归因的观察性证据。这些研究将为意向行为知识的出现提供新的见解。此外，它们可能提供与识别和补救从自闭症到品行障碍的发育障碍相关的见解，这些障碍涉及严重的社会推理缺陷。

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.