Hoehl Stefanie, Reid Vincent, Mooney Jeanette, Striano Tricia
Neurocognition and Development Group, Center for Advanced Studies, University of Leipzig and Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, Leipzig, Germany.
Dev Sci. 2008 Jan;11(1):10-6. doi: 10.1111/j.1467-7687.2007.00643.x.
Previous research suggests that by 4 months of age infants use the eye gaze of adults to guide their attention and facilitate processing of environmental information. Here we address the question of how infants process the relation between another person and an external object. We applied an ERP paradigm to investigate the neural processes underlying the perception of the direction of an adult's eye gaze in 4-month-old infants. Infants showed differential processing of an adult's eye gaze, which was directed at a simultaneously presented object compared to non-object-directed eye gaze. This distinction was evident in two ERP components: The Negative component, reflecting attentional processes, and the positive slow wave, which is involved in memory encoding. The implications of these findings for the development of joint attention and related social cognitive functions are discussed.
先前的研究表明，4个月大的婴儿会利用成年人的目光注视来引导自己的注意力，并促进对环境信息的处理。在此，我们探讨婴儿如何处理他人与外部物体之间的关系这一问题。我们采用了一种事件相关电位（ERP）范式，来研究4个月大婴儿在感知成年人目光注视方向时的神经过程。与非指向物体的目光注视相比，婴儿对指向同时呈现物体的成年人目光注视表现出不同的处理方式。这种差异在两个ERP成分中很明显：反映注意力过程的负成分，以及参与记忆编码的正慢波。我们讨论了这些发现对共同注意及相关社会认知功能发展的意义。
