The developmental origins of the animacy concept

许多发育研究表明，婴儿在出生后的第一年就能区分全局类别（例如动物、交通工具）（例如Behl-Chadha，1996; Mandler &麦克多诺，1993; 1998; Pauen，2002; Quinn &约翰逊，2000）。由于对婴儿可能使用什么样的信息来发展如此广泛的类别感兴趣，大量的研究探索了静态信息的作用。在这些静态属性中，被认为与根据其外观识别动画相关的是面部特征、腿状附属物、身体配置和表面信息。然而，尽管已经提出婴儿的概念也包括动态信息（Rakison & Poulin-Dubois，2001; Mandler，2004），但是很少有研究致力于这个问题。在目前的研究计划中，我和我的合作者研究了最基本概念的发展，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。运动类型、感觉等）。例如，在一些研究中，我们对婴儿在计算机生成的异常事件（例如，公共汽车跳过障碍物）上的视觉注视时间进行编码，并在婴儿被显示正常事件（例如，马跨越相同的障碍）。在其他研究中，我们用计算机生成的事件（例如，测试分类技能和一般认知能力。了解婴儿拥有多少概念知识将有助于我们了解婴儿是否通过进化来形成某些类型的概念，并最终设计程序来诊断有自闭症谱系障碍风险的婴儿。

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.