Rivera Susan M, Zawaydeh Aseen Nancie
Department of Psychology, University of California, Davis, CA 95616, USA.
Brain Res. 2007 May 18;1146:146-57. doi: 10.1016/j.brainres.2006.08.112. Epub 2006 Sep 28.
The present study investigated the role that comprehending words for objects plays in 10- and 11-month-old infants' ability to individuate those objects in a spatiotemporally ambiguous event. To do this, we employed an object individuation task in which infants were familiarized to two objects coming in and out from behind a screen in alternation, and then the screen was removed to reveal either both or only one of the objects. Results show that only when 10- and 11-month-olds comprehend words for both objects seen do they exhibit looking behavior that is consistent with object individuation (i.e., looking longer when one of the objects is surreptitiously removed). Neither level of object permanence reasoning nor overall receptive vocabulary had an effect on performance in the object individuation task, indicating that the effect was specific to the immediate parameters of the situation, and not a function of overall precocity on the part of the succeeding infants. These results suggest that comprehending the words for occluded/disoccluded objects provides a kind of "glue" which allows infants to bind the mental index of an object with its perceptual features (thus precipitating the formation of two mental indexes, rather than one). They further suggest that a shift from object indexing driven by the where (dorsal) system to one which is driven by integration of the ventral and dorsal neural systems, usually not observed until 12 months of age, can be facilitated by word comprehension in 10- and 11-month-old infants.
本研究调查了理解物体名称在10至11个月大婴儿于时空模糊事件中区分这些物体能力方面所起的作用。为此，我们采用了一项物体区分任务，让婴儿交替熟悉从屏幕后进出的两个物体，然后撤掉屏幕，露出两个物体或仅一个物体。结果显示，只有当10至11个月大的婴儿理解所看到的两个物体的名称时，他们才会表现出与物体区分一致的注视行为（即当其中一个物体被偷偷移走时注视时间更长）。物体恒常性推理水平和整体接受性词汇量均对物体区分任务的表现没有影响，这表明该效应特定于当前情境参数，而非后继婴儿整体早熟的作用。这些结果表明，理解被遮挡/未被遮挡物体的名称提供了一种“粘合剂”，使婴儿能够将物体的心理索引与其感知特征联系起来（从而促成形成两个心理索引，而非一个）。它们还进一步表明，通常直到12个月大才会出现的从由“哪里”（背侧）系统驱动的物体索引向由腹侧和背侧神经系统整合驱动的物体索引的转变，在10至11个月大的婴儿中可通过词汇理解得到促进。
