Department of Psychology, Concordia University, PY-170, 7141 Sherbrooke Street West, Montreal, Quebec, Canada H4B 1R6.
Infant Behav Dev. 2009 Dec;32(4):404-15. doi: 10.1016/j.infbeh.2009.06.005. Epub 2009 Jul 19.
The present study examined infants' understanding of other people's intentional actions. The primary goal was to investigate whether infants' performances on visual attention and imitation tasks that have been designed to tap understanding of intentional actions were interrelated. Infants completed a goal-detection task and an action-parsing task at 10 months. At 14 months, infants completed a behavioral re-enactment task and a selective action imitation task that required infants to differentiate intentional from accidental actions. Infants' concurrent performances on visual attention tasks were linked; however, no association was found between their performances on imitation tasks. Importantly, infants' behaviors on the visual attention tasks predicted their performance on the imitation tasks at 14 months. These findings provide the first evidence that there is developmental continuity in infants' understanding of intentional action from 10 to 14 months.
本研究考察了婴儿对他人意图行为的理解。主要目标是研究旨在揭示对意图行为的理解的视觉注意和模仿任务中婴儿的表现是否存在相互关联。婴儿在 10 个月大时完成了目标检测任务和动作解析任务。在 14 个月大时，婴儿完成了行为重演任务和选择性动作模仿任务，要求婴儿区分有意和无意行为。婴儿在视觉注意任务中的表现存在关联；然而，在模仿任务中没有发现关联。重要的是，婴儿在视觉注意任务中的行为表现可以预测他们在 14 个月时的模仿任务表现。这些发现为婴儿在 10 至 14 个月期间对意图行为的理解存在发展连续性提供了首个证据。
