Department of Psychology, SUNY Cortland, Cortland, NY 13045, United States.
Infant Behav Dev. 2012 Jun;35(3):360-8. doi: 10.1016/j.infbeh.2012.04.004. Epub 2012 Jun 19.
The current study examined the functional role redundant amodal information plays in an operant learning task in 5-month-old human infants. Prior studies have suggested that both simple and complex learning processes (discrimination, associative conditioning) are facilitated when amodal information is presented redundantly across sensory modalities. These studies, however, did not test whether the amodal information had to be similar across modalities for facilitation to occur. The current study examined how both matching and mismatching redundant amodal information about the shape of an object would influence learning of an operant response in human infants. Infants learned an operant kick response to move a mobile of cylinders while either holding a cylinder, a rectangular cube, or no object. Kick rate served as the dependent measure. The results showed that infants given mismatching redundant amodal information (e.g., viewed cylinders while holding a rectangular cube) showed inhibited operant learning. These results extend the Intersensory Redundancy Hypothesis by demonstrating that amodal redundancy can function in some instances to inhibit complex learning processes.
本研究考察了冗余非模态信息在 5 个月大的人类婴儿操作性学习任务中的功能作用。先前的研究表明，当非模态信息在不同感觉模态中重复呈现时，简单和复杂的学习过程（辨别、联想条件作用）都会得到促进。然而，这些研究并未测试非模态信息是否必须在模态之间相似才能促进学习。本研究考察了匹配和不匹配关于物体形状的冗余非模态信息如何影响人类婴儿的操作性反应学习。婴儿在握着圆柱体、长方体或没有物体的情况下，学习一种踢动的操作性反应来移动一个圆柱体的移动器。踢腿率作为因变量。结果表明，给予不匹配的冗余非模态信息的婴儿（例如，在拿着长方体的同时观看圆柱体）表现出抑制性的操作性学习。这些结果通过证明非模态冗余在某些情况下可以抑制复杂的学习过程，扩展了感觉冗余假说。
