Advancing research in infant language and cognitive development through eye-tracking

这项提议是为了资助购买眼球追踪器和相关的硬件/软件，以研究婴儿和幼儿的语言和认知发展。注视行为是了解婴儿大脑内容的最重要的窗口，眼球跟踪使研究人员能够解决用更粗略的方法无法解决的问题。我们的工作揭示了婴幼儿复杂的语言和认知能力，以前认为这些能力出现在发育的很晚的阶段。然而，它们的表现背后的处理机制仍然不清楚。例如，我们已经证明，年幼的婴儿会做出概率判断--但他们基于概率信息(如果这些信息将在学习中发挥重要作用的话，这是一种要求)产生对世界的期望的能力是未知的。在语言领域，我们的研究表明，幼儿在不同语境下对单词的最终解释与成年人有显著的相似之处--但尚不清楚幼儿在不同语境下处理单词时考虑的信息和不同的解释。所要求的设备通过提供回答这些关键问题所需的时间和空间分辨率的数据，有可能显著提高我们对早期语音、语言和认知处理的理解。

This proposal is to fund the purchase of an eye-tracker and associated hardware/software to study language and cognitive development in infants and toddlers. Looking behaviour is the foremost window into the contents of infants' minds, and eye-tracking allows researchers to tackle questions that cannot be addressed with more coarse-grained methods. Our work has revealed sophisticated language and cognitive capacities in infants and toddlers, previously thought to emerge much later in development. However, the processing mechanisms underlying their performance remain unclear. For example, we have demonstrated that young infants make probability judgments - but their ability to generate expectations of the world based on probabilistic information (a requirement if such information is going to play a significant role in learning) is unknown. In the language domain, our work suggests that toddlers' ultimate interpretations of words in different contexts shows remarkable parallels to adults' - but it is unclear what information and alternative interpretations toddlers consider as they process words in different contexts. The requested equipment has the potential to significantly advance our understanding of early speech, language, and cognitive processing, by providing data at the temporal and spatial resolution required for answering such critical questions.