Saxe Rebecca, Tzelnic Tania, Carey Susan
Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA.
Dev Psychol. 2007 Jan;43(1):149-58. doi: 10.1037/0012-1649.43.1.149.
Preverbal infants can represent the causal structure of events, including distinguishing the agentive and receptive roles and categorizing entities according to stable causal dispositions. This study investigated how infants combine these 2 kinds of causal inference. In Experiments 1 and 2, 9.5-month-olds used the position of a human hand or a novel puppet (causal agents), but not a toy train (an inert object), to predict the subsequent motion of a beanbag. Conversely, in Experiment 3, 10- and 7-month-olds used the motion of the beanbag to infer the position of a hand but not of a toy block. These data suggest that preverbal infants expect a causal agent as the source of motion of an inert object.
尚不能言语的婴儿能够表征事件的因果结构,包括区分施动和受动角色,并根据稳定的因果倾向对实体进行分类。本研究调查了婴儿如何结合这两种因果推理。在实验1和实验2中,9.5个月大的婴儿利用人手或新型木偶(因果施动者)的位置,而非玩具火车(无生命物体)的位置,来预测沙包随后的运动。相反,在实验3中,10个月和7个月大的婴儿利用沙包的运动来推断手的位置,而非玩具积木的位置。这些数据表明,尚不能言语的婴儿期望因果施动者作为无生命物体运动的来源。