Johnson Scott P, Amso Dima, Slemmer Jonathan A
Department of Psychology, New York University, New York, NY 10003, USA.
Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2003 Sep 2;100(18):10568-73. doi: 10.1073/pnas.1630655100. Epub 2003 Aug 25.
Concepts of objects as enduring and complete across space and time have been documented in infants within several months after birth, but little is known about how such concepts arise during development. Current theories that stress innate knowledge may neglect the potential contributions of experience to guide acquisition of object concepts. To examine whether learning plays an important role in early development of object representations, we used an eye-tracking paradigm with 4- and 6-month-old infants who were provided with an initial period of experience viewing an unoccluded trajectory, or no experience with this particular stimulus. After exposure to the unoccluded trajectory for only 2 min, there was a reliable increase in 4-month-old infants' anticipatory eye movement when the infants subsequently viewed occluded-trajectory displays, relative to 4-month-old infants who did not receive this experience. This effect of training in 4-month-old infants was found to generalize to another category of trajectory orientation. Older infants received no additional benefit from training, most likely because they enter the task capable of forming robust object representations under these conditions. This finding provides compelling evidence that very brief training facilitated formation of object representations, and suggests more generally that infants learn such representations from real-world experience viewing objects undergoing occlusion and disocclusion.
关于客体在空间和时间上具有持久性和完整性的概念，在婴儿出生后的几个月内就已得到证实，但对于这些概念在发育过程中是如何产生的，人们却知之甚少。当前强调先天知识的理论可能忽略了经验在引导客体概念习得方面的潜在作用。为了检验学习在客体表征早期发育中是否发挥重要作用，我们采用了一种眼动追踪范式，对4个月和6个月大的婴儿进行研究，给一部分婴儿一段观看无遮挡轨迹的初始体验期，而另一部分婴儿则没有这种特定刺激的体验。在仅接触无遮挡轨迹2分钟后，相对于未接受该体验的4个月大婴儿，当这些婴儿随后观看遮挡轨迹展示时，他们的预期眼动有了可靠的增加。结果发现，4个月大婴儿的这种训练效果可以推广到另一类轨迹方向。年龄较大的婴儿没有从训练中获得额外益处，很可能是因为他们在进入这项任务时就能够在这些条件下形成稳固的客体表征。这一发现提供了令人信服的证据，表明非常短暂的训练促进了客体表征的形成，并且更普遍地表明，婴儿从观看经历遮挡和无遮挡的客体的现实世界体验中学习此类表征。
