Department of General and Developmental Psychology, University of Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland.
Dev Psychol. 2013 Jul;49(7):1325-9. doi: 10.1037/a0029746. Epub 2012 Aug 20.
Research on object cognition in infancy suggests that children from (at latest) 1 year of age are capable of individuating objects according to property/kind information. It remains unclear from previous work, however, whether infants in such studies truly apply sortal (kind) concepts or whether they merely track objects on the basis of superficial surface features. To clarify this question, we examined infants' flexibility in tracking property changes. In particular, we investigated which property changes infants see as diagnostic for kind changes and whether they can dynamically adapt this view as a function of prior knowledge. Fourteen-month-old infants were presented with a salient property transformation indicating a category change (i.e., a rabbit was placed in a box but a carrot was retrieved from it). Prior to the test, half of the infants saw how a stuffed animal could be transformed into another object by a simple mechanism. The other infants were unaware of this transformation. Only infants of the naive group interpreted the property change observed in the subsequent test as diagnostic for a change in identity and thus expected two objects to be present in the box. The results are discussed in the light of psychological essentialism, which can explain why infants treat some classes of property changes but not others as diagnostic for changes in identity.
婴儿物体认知研究表明，儿童从（最晚）1 岁起就能够根据属性/种类信息来区分物体。然而，之前的研究仍不清楚婴儿在这些研究中是否真正应用了分类（种类）概念，或者他们是否仅仅基于表面的表面特征来跟踪物体。为了澄清这个问题，我们研究了婴儿在跟踪属性变化方面的灵活性。具体来说，我们调查了婴儿将哪些属性变化视为种类变化的诊断依据，以及他们是否可以根据先前的知识动态调整这种观点。14 个月大的婴儿接受了一个显著的属性转换测试，该测试表明了一个类别变化（即，一只兔子被放在一个盒子里，但从里面取出了一个胡萝卜）。在测试之前，一半的婴儿看到了一个填充动物玩具如何通过一个简单的机制转换成另一个物体。另一半婴儿不知道这个转换。只有在天真组的婴儿将随后测试中观察到的属性变化解释为身份变化的诊断依据，因此预计盒子里会有两个物体。结果根据心理本质主义进行了讨论，心理本质主义可以解释为什么婴儿会将某些类别的属性变化视为身份变化的诊断依据，而不会将其他属性变化视为身份变化的诊断依据。
