Frank Michael C, Slemmer Jonathan A, Marcus Gary F, Johnson Scott P
Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA.
Dev Sci. 2009 Jul;12(4):504-9. doi: 10.1111/j.1467-7687.2008.00794.x.
By 7 months of age, infants are able to learn rules based on the abstract relationships between stimuli (Marcus et al., 1999), but they are better able to do so when exposed to speech than to some other classes of stimuli. In the current experiments we ask whether multimodal stimulus information will aid younger infants in identifying abstract rules. We habituated 5-month-olds to simple abstract patterns (ABA or ABB) instantiated in coordinated looming visual shapes and speech sounds (Experiment 1), shapes alone (Experiment 2), and speech sounds accompanied by uninformative but coordinated shapes (Experiment 3). Infants showed evidence of rule learning only in the presence of the informative multimodal cues. We hypothesize that the additional evidence present in these multimodal displays was responsible for the success of younger infants in learning rules, congruent with both a Bayesian account and with the Intersensory Redundancy Hypothesis.
到7个月大时，婴儿能够根据刺激之间的抽象关系学习规则（马库斯等人，1999年），但与接触其他一些类别的刺激相比，他们在接触语音时更能做到这一点。在当前的实验中，我们探讨多模态刺激信息是否会帮助更小的婴儿识别抽象规则。我们让5个月大的婴儿对以协调的逼近视觉形状和语音（实验1）、仅形状（实验2）以及伴有无信息但协调形状的语音（实验3）呈现的简单抽象模式（ABA或ABB）形成习惯化。婴儿仅在存在信息丰富的多模态线索时才表现出规则学习的迹象。我们假设这些多模态展示中存在的额外证据是更小的婴儿成功学习规则的原因，这与贝叶斯理论以及感官间冗余假说均相符。
