Centre for Brain and Cognitive Development, Birkbeck, University of London, UK.
Dev Psychol. 2011 Nov;47(6):1499-503. doi: 10.1037/a0025659. Epub 2011 Sep 26.
The current study tested whether the purely amodal cue of contingency elicits orientation following behavior in 8-month-old infants. We presented 8-month-old infants with automated objects without human features that did or did not react contingently to the infants' fixations recorded by an eye tracker. We found that an object's occasional orientation toward peripheral targets was reciprocated by a congruent visual orientation following response by infants only when it had displayed gaze-contingent interactivity. Our finding demonstrates that infants' gaze-following behavior does not depend on the presence of a human being. The results are consistent with the idea that, in 8-month-old infants, the detection of contingent reactivity, like other communicative signals, can itself elicit the illusion of being addressed.
本研究旨在测试单纯的模态线索的偶然性是否能引起 8 个月大婴儿的跟随行为。我们向 8 个月大的婴儿展示了没有人类特征的自动物体，这些物体要么根据婴儿的注视记录（由眼动追踪器记录）做出偶然反应，要么不做出反应。我们发现，只有当物体表现出与注视相关的互动性时，它偶尔朝向周边目标的方向才会得到婴儿与之相匹配的视觉跟随反应。我们的发现表明，婴儿的目光跟随行为并不依赖于人类的存在。这一结果与以下观点一致，即在 8 个月大的婴儿中，对偶然性反应的检测，就像其他交流信号一样，本身就能产生被关注的错觉。
