Infants' approach to learning about the physical world

描述（由申请人提供）：当他们环顾四周时，婴儿通常会观察到许多不同的物理事件：例如，他们可能会看到父母将果汁倒入杯子中，将盘子放在桌子上，或将食品杂货存放在橱柜中。在过去的10年里，我和我的合作者一直致力于发展一个关于婴儿如何对简单的物理事件进行推理的解释，以及这种推理如何随着经验的积累而逐渐变得更加复杂。在进度报告中，我总结了在上一个赠款期间进行的15个项目的结果，这些项目帮助我们测试和扩展了我们的账户。这项研究的结果是，我们现在对婴儿的物理推理系统如何运作有了更清晰的了解：婴儿在观看物理事件时可能代表什么特定信息，以及他们如何使用这些信息来解释和预测事件的结果。在过去的几年里，我们也开始探索婴儿谁不自发地代表一个事件的关键信息可能会被诱导这样做，通过各种上下文操作。其中一些效应似乎取决于身体推理系统与其他两个系统之间的微妙相互作用，这两个系统是由成人和婴儿视觉认知文献中的发现提出的：物体跟踪系统和另一个系统，我的合作者和我称之为物体表征系统。在婴儿认知领域，这是一个真正令人兴奋的时代，因为不同子领域的发展正在汇集在一起，描绘出一幅更详细的计算架构图，这是婴儿对物体和事件反应的基础。下一个资助期的第一个项目（项目1）将继续我们对物理推理系统的研究，并将试图阐明上一个资助期的惊人发现，这些发现与婴儿获得物理知识的事件类别效应和二元性有关。其他项目（项目2-11）将探索物理推理系统与上述两个其他系统之间的可能联系。特别是，这些项目应该阐明婴儿不仅对单一事件，而且对涉及相同或不同物体的事件序列的反应。总共计划了11个项目（包括30个实验），这将使我们能够极大地扩展对婴儿物理推理的理解，并与婴儿认知的其他子领域建立新的和富有成效的联系。与上一个赠款期一样，这些项目将使用违反预期和行动任务。此外，我们正在开发另一种方法，即预期任务，它应该为我们的结论提供进一步的趋同证据。公共卫生相关性：在生命的第一年，婴儿通常会获得大量关于物理世界的知识。他们是如何做到的？目前的研究将有助于阐明认知结构，使婴儿，从很小的年龄，代表，推理，并了解物理事件。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): As they look about them, infants routinely observe many different physical events: for example, they may see a parent pour juice into a cup, stack dishes on a table, or store groceries in a cupboard. Over the past 10 years, my collaborators and I have been working on developing an account of how infants reason about simple physical events, and how this reasoning becomes gradually more sophisticated with experience. In the Progress Report, I summarize the results of 15 projects conducted during the last grant period that helped us test and extend our account. As a result of this research, we now have a much clearer idea of how infants' physical-reasoning system operates: what specific information infants are likely to represent when watching a physical event, and how they are likely to use this information to interpret and predict the event's outcome. Over the past few years, we have also begun to explore how infants who do not spontaneously represent key information about an event may be induced to do so through various contextual manipulations. Some of these effects appear to depend on subtle interplays between the physical-reasoning system and two other systems suggested by findings in the adult and infant visual cognition literature: the object-tracking system and another system my collaborators and I term the object-representation system. This is a truly exciting era in the field of infant cognition, as developments in different subfields are coming together to paint a much more detailed picture of the computational architecture that underlies infants' responses to objects and events. The first project in the next grant period (PROJECT 1) will continue our investigation of the physical-reasoning system, and will attempt to shed light on striking findings from the last grant period having to do with event category effects and dicalages in infants' acquisition of their physical knowledge. The other projects (PROJECTS 2-11) will explore possible links between the physical- reasoning system and the two other systems mentioned above. In particular, these projects should shed light on how infants respond not only to single events, but also to sequences of events involving the same or different objects. In all, 11 projects (comprising 30 experiments) are planned that will allow us to dramatically expand our understanding of infants' physical reasoning, and to establish new and productive connections to other subfields of infant cognition. As in the previous grant period, the projects will use violation-of-expectation and action tasks. In addition, we are in the process of developing one additional method anticipatory-looking tasks that should provide further converging evidence for our conclusions. PUBLIC HEALTH RELEVANCE: During the first year of life, infants normally acquire a great deal of knowledge about the physical world. How do they do so? The present research will help shed light on the cognitive architecture that allows infants, from a very early age, to represent, to reason, and to learn about physical events.