The developmental origins of the animacy concept

许多发展研究表明，婴儿在生命的第一年就能区分全球类别（如动物、交通工具）（如Behl-Chadha, 1996; Mandler & McDonough, 1993; 1998; Pauen, 2002; Quinn & Johnson, 2000）。由于对婴儿可能会使用什么样的信息来发展如此广泛的分类感兴趣，大量的研究探索了静态信息的作用。在这些静态属性中，被认为与识别动物的外观有关的是面部特征、腿状附属物、身体结构和表面信息。然而，尽管有人提出婴儿的概念也包括动态信息（Rakison & pouin - dubois, 2001; Mandler, 2004），但很少有研究致力于这一问题。在目前的研究项目中，我和我的合作者研究最基本概念的发展，这些概念用于对世界上存在的各种事物进行分类：人、动物、家具、车辆等。我们使用不同的方法来测试婴儿对与不同类别的物体相关的性质的知识（例如，运动类型，感觉等）。例如，在一些研究中，我们对婴儿对计算机生成的异常事件（如公共汽车跳过障碍物）的视觉固定时间进行编码，并与婴儿看到的正常事件（如马跳过相同的障碍物）进行比较。在其他研究中，我们用电脑生成的事件（例如，人走路）来启动婴儿，并测试分类技能和一般认知能力。了解婴儿拥有多少概念性知识将有助于我们了解婴儿是否通过进化进入世界，形成某些概念，并最终设计出诊断婴儿患自闭症谱系障碍风险的程序。

Many developmental studies have shown that infants differentiate between global categories (e.g. animals, vehicles) within the first year of life (e.g. Behl-Chadha, 1996; Mandler & McDonough, 1993; 1998; Pauen, 2002; Quinn & Johnson, 2000). Being interested in what kind of information infants may use for developing such broad categories, a large body of research explores the role of static information. Among those static attributes considered relevant for identifying animates in terms of their appearance are facial features, leg-like appendages, body configuration and surface information. However, although it has been proposed that infants' concepts also include dynamic information (Rakison & Poulin-Dubois, 2001; Mandler, 2004), little research has been devoted to this issue. In the present research program, my collaborators and I study the development of the most fundamental concepts, those used to categorize the kinds of things that exist in the world: people, animals, furniture, vehicles, etc. We use different methods to test infants' knowledge about the kind of qualities associated with different categories of objects (e.g., type of motion, sensations, etc). For example, in some studies we code infants' visual fixation time on computer-generated events that are anomalous (e.g. bus jumping over an obstacle) and compare them when the infants are shown normal events (e.g., horse jumps over same obstacle). In other studies, we prime infants with computer-generated events (e.g., man walking and test categorization skills and general cognitive abilities. Knowing how much of conceptual knowledge infants possess will help us to know whether infants enter the world prepared by evolution to form certain kinds of concepts and ultimately to design procedures to diagnose infants at risk for autism spectrum disorders.