Elsner Birgit, Pauen Sabina, Jeschonek Susanna
Department of Developmental and Physiological Psychology, University of Heidelberg, Germany.
Dev Sci. 2006 Nov;9(6):551-6. doi: 10.1111/j.1467-7687.2006.00532.x.
This report investigates the relations between duration of examining and heart rate (HR) across several trials of an object-examination task. A total of N= 20 11-month-olds were familiarized with a sequence of 10 different exemplars from the same global category (animals or furniture) before they received an exemplar from the contrasting category at test. Consistent with previous findings, HR was lower during states of focused attention (i.e. examining) than during states of casual attention (i.e. looking) or non-looking. Over the familiarization trials, examining stayed about the same, while mean HR increased. At test, examining increased and mean HR decreased, indicating that infants focused their attention on the out-of-category object. Psychophysiological and behavioral measures of attention were systematically related over trials, suggesting that heart rate provides a suitable objective measure to study infants' categorization performance in object-examination tasks.
本报告研究了在一项物体检查任务的多个试验中，检查持续时间与心率（HR）之间的关系。共有N = 20名11个月大的婴儿，在接受来自对比类别的一个范例进行测试之前，他们先熟悉了来自同一总体类别（动物或家具）的10个不同范例的序列。与之前的研究结果一致，在集中注意力状态（即检查）下的心率低于随意注意力状态（即看）或不看时的心率。在熟悉试验中，检查时间大致相同，而平均心率增加。在测试时，检查时间增加而平均心率下降，这表明婴儿将注意力集中在了类别外的物体上。在各个试验中，注意力的心理生理和行为测量结果存在系统关联，这表明心率为研究婴儿在物体检查任务中的分类表现提供了一个合适的客观测量指标。
