Schöner Gregor, Thelen Esther
Institut fur Neuroinformatik, Ruhr-Universität Bochum, Bochum 44780, Germany.
Psychol Rev. 2006 Apr;113(2):273-99. doi: 10.1037/0033-295X.113.2.273.
Much of what psychologists know about infant perception and cognition is based on habituation, but the process itself is still poorly understood. Here the authors offer a dynamic field model of infant visual habituation, which simulates the known features of habituation, including familiarity and novelty effects, stimulus intensity effects, and age and individual differences. The model is based on a general class of dynamic (time-based) models that integrate environmental input in varying metric dimensions to reach a single decision. Here the authors provide simulated visual input of varying strengths, distances, and durations to 2 coupled and interacting fields. The 1st represents the activation that drives "looking," and the 2nd, the inhibition that leads to "looking away," or habituation. By varying the parameters of the field, the authors simulate the time course of habituation trials and show how these dynamics can lead to different depths of habituation, which then determine how the system dishabituates. The authors use the model to simulate a set of influential experiments by R. Baillargeon (1986, 1987a, 1987b) using the well-known "drawbridge" paradigm. The dynamic field model provides a coherent explanation without invoking infant object knowledge. The authors show that small changes in model parameters can lead to qualitatively different outcomes. Because in typical infant cognition experiments, critical parameters are unknown, effects attributed to conceptual knowledge may be explained by the dynamics of habituation.
心理学家对婴儿感知和认知的了解大多基于习惯化，但这一过程本身仍未得到充分理解。在此，作者提出了一种婴儿视觉习惯化的动态场模型，该模型模拟了习惯化的已知特征，包括熟悉度和新奇效应、刺激强度效应以及年龄和个体差异。该模型基于一类通用的动态（基于时间的）模型，这类模型在不同的度量维度上整合环境输入以做出单一决策。在此，作者向两个相互耦合和相互作用的场提供了不同强度、距离和持续时间的模拟视觉输入。第一个场代表驱动“注视”的激活，第二个场代表导致“移开视线”或习惯化的抑制。通过改变场的参数，作者模拟了习惯化试验的时间进程，并展示了这些动态过程如何导致不同深度的习惯化，进而决定系统如何去习惯化。作者使用该模型模拟了R. 贝拉吉昂（1986年、1987年a、1987年b）使用著名的“吊桥”范式进行的一系列有影响力的实验。动态场模型提供了一个连贯的解释，而无需援引婴儿的客体知识。作者表明，模型参数的微小变化可能导致质的不同结果。由于在典型的婴儿认知实验中，关键参数是未知的，归因于概念知识的效应可能由习惯化的动态过程来解释。
