Department of Psychology, Temple University, 1701 North 13th Street, Philadelphia, PA 19122, USA.
Neural Netw. 2010 Oct-Nov;23(8-9):1017-25. doi: 10.1016/j.neunet.2010.07.007. Epub 2010 Aug 5.
Human development occurs in a social environment in which learning is tightly coupled to the behavior of other supportive humans. One aspect of this coupling may occur through motor contagion, in which observing the actions of other people is associated with the activation of related motor representations. In order to explore the overlap between action observation and action execution in early childhood, a novel task was developed in which 4-year-old children were instructed to move a stylus on a graphics tablet in the presence of a background video which showed a model moving her arm in a direction that was either congruent or incongruent with the instructed axis of the child's stylus movements. The presence of incongruent background movements was associated with a significant interference effect on children's stylus movements. This interference effect was stronger when the background movements were performed by a same-age peer rather than by an adult. It is suggested that early childhood is a particularly interesting age period to study motor contagion, since the transition from infancy to childhood involves concurrent changes in cognitive control and in the ability to flexibly decouple perception and action. The examination of motor contagion provides an important consideration of social influences on cognitive control in early childhood--influences that have been somewhat neglected in the developmental literature on the related construct of executive functioning.
人类的发展发生在一个社会环境中，在这个环境中，学习与其他支持人类的行为紧密结合。这种结合的一个方面可能通过运动感染来实现，即观察他人的行为与相关运动表象的激活有关。为了探索儿童早期的动作观察和动作执行之间的重叠，开发了一种新的任务，在该任务中，要求 4 岁的儿童在背景视频的存在下，用图形平板电脑上的手写笔移动，该视频显示一个模型朝着与儿童手写笔运动的指令轴一致或不一致的方向移动手臂。背景运动的存在与儿童手写笔运动的显著干扰效应有关。当背景运动是由同龄的同伴而不是成年人完成时，这种干扰效应更强。研究表明，儿童早期是研究运动感染的一个特别有趣的年龄阶段，因为从婴儿期到儿童期的过渡涉及认知控制和灵活分离感知和行动的能力的同时变化。对运动感染的研究为社会对儿童早期认知控制的影响提供了一个重要的考虑因素，而在关于执行功能的相关结构的发展文献中，这些影响在一定程度上被忽视了。
