Department of Psychological Sciences, University of Missouri, Columbia, MO 65211, USA.
Dev Sci. 2010 Jan 1;13(1):134-42. doi: 10.1111/j.1467-7687.2009.00863.x.
Twelve-month-olds realize that when an agent cannot see an object, her incomplete perceptions still guide her goal-directed actions. What would happen if the agent had incomplete perceptions because she could see only one part of the object, for example one side of a screen? In the present research, 16-month-olds were first shown an agent who always pointed to a red object, as opposed to a black or a yellow object, suggesting that she preferred red over the other colours. Next, two screens were introduced while the agent was absent. The screens were (1) red or green on both sides; (2) red on the front (infants' side) but green on the back (the agent's side) or vice versa; or (3) only coloured red or green on the front. During test, the agent, who could see only the back of the screens, pointed to one of the two screens. The results revealed that while infants expected the agent to continue acting on her colour preference and point to the red rather than the green screen during test, they did so in accord with the agent's perception of the screens, rather than their own perceptions: they expected the agent to point to the red screen in (1), but to the green-front screen in (2), and they had no prediction of which screen the agent should point to in (3). The implications of the present findings for early psychological reasoning research are discussed.
12 个月大的婴儿已经认识到，当一个行为主体无法看到某个物体时，她不完整的感知仍然可以指导她的目标导向行为。如果行为主体只能看到物体的一部分，例如屏幕的一侧，会发生什么情况呢？在本研究中，首先向 16 个月大的婴儿展示了一个行为主体，她总是指向红色的物体，而不是黑色或黄色的物体，这表明她更喜欢红色而不是其他颜色。接下来，当行为主体不在场时引入了两个屏幕。这些屏幕有以下三种情况：（1）两面都是红色或绿色；（2）正面（婴儿侧）是红色而背面（行为主体侧）是绿色，或者反之；（3）只有正面是红色或绿色。在测试中，只能看到屏幕背面的行为主体指向两个屏幕中的一个。结果显示，虽然婴儿期望行为主体继续根据她的颜色偏好行事，并在测试中指向红色而不是绿色的屏幕，但他们这样做是根据行为主体对屏幕的感知，而不是他们自己的感知：他们期望行为主体在情况（1）中指向红色屏幕，在情况（2）中指向红色正面屏幕，但在情况（3）中他们无法预测行为主体应该指向哪个屏幕。本文的研究结果对早期心理推理研究具有重要意义。
