Department of Psychology, Graduate School of Letters, Kyoto University, Yoshidahonmachi, Sakyo-ku, Kyoto 606-8501, Japan.
Nat Commun. 2011 Jun 7;2:341. doi: 10.1038/ncomms1342.
How do infants understand the goals of others' actions? It has been proposed that action-understanding results from a mechanism whereby an observed action is mapped onto the observer's own motor representation of that action. However, direct evidence of the matching process in early infancy is difficult to find. Here we show the developmental correspondence between action prediction and motor ability by comparing gazing and grasping responses to interesting objects in 4- to 10-month-old infants and adults. The onset of infants' ability to predict the goal of others' action was found to be synchronized with the onset of their own ability to perform that action. Moreover, there was correspondence relationship between action-prediction ability and motor ability of same action. Our findings indicate that the ability to predict others' action goals requires a corresponding motor ability, providing ontogenetic evidence for a direct matching process by a mirror neuron system.
婴儿是如何理解他人行为目的的？有一种观点认为，对行为的理解源于一种机制，即观察到的行为被映射到观察者自身对该行为的运动表象上。然而，在婴儿早期很难找到匹配过程的直接证据。在这里，我们通过比较 4 至 10 个月大的婴儿和成年人对有趣物体的注视和抓握反应，展示了动作预测和运动能力之间的发展对应关系。我们发现，婴儿预测他人行为目的的能力的出现与他们自身执行该行为的能力的出现是同步的。此外，相同动作的动作预测能力和运动能力之间存在对应关系。我们的研究结果表明，预测他人行为目标的能力需要相应的运动能力，为镜像神经元系统的直接匹配过程提供了发生学证据。
