Elsner Birgit
Department of Psychology, University of Heidelberg, Hauptstrasse 47-51, D-69117 Heidelberg, Germany.
Acta Psychol (Amst). 2007 Jan;124(1):44-59. doi: 10.1016/j.actpsy.2006.09.006. Epub 2006 Oct 31.
This paper reviews studies on infants' imitation of goal-directed actions in the first two years of life. Special emphasis is given to the role of the two observable components of an action, that is, the movement and the action effects, on infants' replication of target actions. The reviewed studies provide evidence that infants benefit most from a full demonstration of both movements and effects. If movements are demonstrated in isolation, infants may encode this information, but they preferentially reproduce actions that lead to salient effects. If action effects are presented in isolation, infants younger than 19 months usually fail to emulate the unseen movements that would be necessary to produce these effects. Infants' ability to predict action effects or to infer unseen movements from incomplete demonstrations improves substantially at the end of the second year of life. It is concluded that the capability to learn relations between movements and action effects by observation, and the knowledge about movement-effect relations acquired so far, may be important factors underlying the developmental changes in infants' imitation of goal-directed actions.
本文回顾了关于婴儿在生命最初两年对目标导向动作模仿的研究。特别强调了动作的两个可观察组成部分，即动作和动作效果，对婴儿复制目标动作的作用。所回顾的研究提供了证据表明，婴儿从动作和效果的完整演示中受益最大。如果只单独演示动作，婴儿可能会编码这些信息，但他们会优先重现导致显著效果的动作。如果只单独呈现动作效果，19个月以下的婴儿通常无法模仿产生这些效果所需的不可见动作。婴儿预测动作效果或从不完整演示中推断不可见动作的能力在生命第二年结束时会有显著提高。得出的结论是，通过观察学习动作与动作效果之间关系的能力，以及到目前为止所获得的关于动作-效果关系的知识，可能是婴儿目标导向动作模仿发展变化的重要潜在因素。
