The role of action in the development of visual object recognition

描述(申请人提供)：视觉物体识别过程在人类认知的多个方面发挥着核心作用。然而，除了最早的婴儿期外，人们对这些过程的发展知之甚少。一篇长篇文献表明，成年人的视觉和行动之间存在着深刻而基本的协调。动作对视觉发展至关重要的一种方式是，人自己对物体的动作产生了关于物体的动态视觉体验。自我生成的动作从字面上创建了一个人对对象的看法。在拟议的研究中，我们试图了解自我生成动作的发展变化在视觉对象表征和识别发展中的作用。参与者将是年龄在18到24个月之间的儿童--先前的研究表明，在这个年龄范围内，物体识别会发生显著的发展变化。这一年龄段也是典型发育儿童语言快速发展的时期，也是语言、运动和更广泛的认知发展的非典型模式通常首先被发现的时期。因此，研究对象结构的自生成动态观将为研究非典型认知发展的机制和早期诊断提供新的窗口。我们着重于视觉对象表征的三个方面，这在成人高水平视觉研究中被认为是重要的，我们的初步研究表明，这三个方面源于18至24个月的时间：1)偏好视图--偏爱观察对象的平面(侧面、正面、背面、顶部和底部)而不是平面之间区域的视图的原因和结果；2)延长轴--儿童如何相对于对象的延长轴握持和移动对象的发展变化的原因，以及对儿童对这些对象的感知和表征的影响；3)全局结构--从稀疏的几何结构特征中识别对象的能力。我们将使用横断面研究和训练研究来研究动作在儿童视觉物体识别的每一个典型发展方面的作用。公共卫生相关性：患有知觉和运动障碍的儿童有学习、语言和注意力障碍的风险。这项工作研究了典型发育中的婴儿(18-24个月)视觉运动发育的连锁后果，这是有效早期诊断和治疗的必要科学基础。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Processes of visual object recognition play a central role in multiple aspects of human cognition. However, very little is known about the development of these processes beyond the earliest stages of infancy. A long literature suggests a deep and fundamental coordination between vision and action in adults. One way in which action should matter critically to visual development is that one's own actions on objects generate the dynamic visual experiences that one receives about objects. Self-generated actions literally create one's views of objects. In the proposed research, we seek to understand the role of developmental changes in self-generated action in the development of visual object representations and recognition. The participants will be children between 18 and 24 months of age -- an age range during which prior work indicates that significant developmental change in object recognition occurs. This age range is also a period of rapid language expansion in typically developing children, and a period in which atypical patterns of language, motor, and more diffuse cognitive development are often first identified. Thus, the study of self-generated dynamic views of object structure will provide a new window into mechanisms and early diagnosis of atypical cognitive development. We focus on 3 aspects of visual object representations, suggested to be important in studies of high level vision in adults, which our preliminary studies indicate have roots in the 18 to 24 month period: 1) Preferred views -- the causes and consequences of the emergence of a preference for viewing the planes of objects (sides, front, back, top, and bottom) rather than views of areas between planar surfaces; 2) Axes of elongation -- the causes of developmental changes in how children hold and move objects relative to the objects' axes of elongation, and the consequences for children's perception and representation of those objects; and 3) Global structure -- the ability to recognize objects from sparse characterizations of their geometric structure. We will use both cross-sectional and training studies to investigate the roles of action in each of these aspects of typically developing children's visual object recognition. PUBLIC HEALTH RELEVANCE: Children with perceptual and motor disorders are at risk for learning, language and attentional disorders. This work studies the cascading consequences of visual-motor development in typically developing infants (18-24-month-olds), a necessary scientific foundation to effective early diagnoses and therapies.