Einav Shiri, Hood Bruce M
Department of Experimental Psychology, University of Bristol, Bristol, United Kingdom.
Dev Psychol. 2006 Jan;42(1):142-52. doi: 10.1037/0012-1649.42.1.142.
This study examined 4- and 5-year-olds' ability to spontaneously use the relative duration and frequency of another's object-directed gaze for inferring that person's preference. In Experiment 1, analysis revealed a strong age effect for judgment accuracy, which could not be accounted for by cue-monitoring proficiency. Reducing the saliency of the objects in Experiment 2 yielded significant improvement in the younger children's performance. Thus, at 4 years, children already show signs of attending to the temporal dimension of gaze for making mentalistic inferences of preferential liking, but their competence may be undermined by the object choices themselves. By 5 years, they appear to overcome this competition. The obtained developmental difference is discussed in terms of concurrent transitions in attention regulation.
本研究考察了4岁和5岁儿童自发利用他人指向物体的注视的相对持续时间和频率来推断该人偏好的能力。在实验1中，分析揭示了判断准确性上存在显著的年龄效应，这不能用线索监测能力来解释。在实验2中降低物体的显著性，使得年幼儿童的表现有了显著改善。因此，4岁时，儿童已表现出关注注视的时间维度以对偏好进行心理推断的迹象，但他们的能力可能会受到物体选择本身的影响。到5岁时，他们似乎克服了这种竞争。根据注意力调节的同步转变对所获得的发展差异进行了讨论。
