The Early Understanding Goals in Social Contexts

在我们的日常生活中，识别有生命的实体并推断它们的意图、知识和欲望是无处不在的，确实是必要的。对这些认知能力发展的研究是一个活跃而重要的研究领域，但人类成熟的成人能力的基本潜在机制和先兆仍在很大程度上尚不清楚。该研究计划的主要目标是发现婴儿如何检测和预测他人的目标导向行为。*通过使用眼球跟踪程序的一系列实验，该研究计划将建立在我和其他实验室NSERC资助的研究结果的基础上。在过去的这项研究中，通过测量参与者对实验者相对程式化和预先编写的动作的反应，检验了婴幼儿编码他人目标的能力。有了新的头戴式眼球跟踪技术，我们现在能够研究在个人之间的动态交互中展开的动作的处理。*利用我之前在实验室中使用的实验场景和其他人的实验场景，我们将专注于两个基本但非常重要的人类交互：给予(一个人向另一个人提供物体)和分发(一个人在两个或更多其他人之间分配物体)。这两种类型的互动都在我们人类更广泛的亲社会行为中，这些行为在健康的人际关系和同伴接纳中发挥着不可或缺的作用。*因此，本课程探索的能力构成了我们理解他人行为的日常能力的基础，特别是那些支撑我们无处不在的亲社会行为的行为。通过了解这些基础的发展，我们将深入了解允许人类参与高度复杂和灵活的亲社会互动的基本认知机制，这是发展、临床和进化心理学、教育、经济学、动物行为/认知和人工智能等领域的人感兴趣的领域。此外，我们将更好地准备检查这些能力受损的障碍。**

Recognizing animate entities and inferring their intentions, knowledge, and desires is ubiquitous, indeed necessary, in our daily lives. The study of the development of these cognitive capacities is an active and important research field, but the basic underlying mechanisms and precursors to our sophisticated adult abilities still remain largely unknown. The primary objective of the research program is to discover how infants detect and predict the goal-directed actions of others.***Through a series of experiments using eye-tracking procedures, the research program will build from the results of NSERC-funded research in my laboratory and those of others. In this past research, the ability of infants and young children to encode others' goals has been examined by measuring participants' responses to an experimenter's relatively stylized and pre-scripted action. With new head-mounted eye-tracking technologies, we are now able examine the processing of actions as they unfold within a dynamic interaction between individuals.***Leveraging experimental scenarios used previously in my laboratory and those of others, we will focus on two basic, yet highly important, human interactions: giving (an individual provides another individual with an object) and distributing (an individual allocates objects between two or more other individuals). Both types of interactions are within our species' broader suite of prosocial behaviours, which play an integral role in healthy relationships and peer acceptance.***Thus, the abilities explored in this program form the foundation of our everyday ability to make sense of others' actions, particularly those actions that underlie our ubiquitous prosocial behaviour. By understanding the development of these foundations, we will gain insight into the basic cognitive mechanisms that allow humans to engage in highly complex and flexible prosocial interactions, an area of interest for those in fields spanning developmental, clinical, and evolutionary psychology, education, economics, animal behaviour/cognition, and artificial intelligence, among others. Additionally, we will be better prepared to examine the disorders in which these abilities are impaired. **