Department of Psychology, Graduate School of Letters, Kyoto University, Kyoto 606-8501, Japan.
Cognition. 2013 Aug;128(2):127-33. doi: 10.1016/j.cognition.2013.03.011. Epub 2013 May 11.
Social learning enables infants to acquire information, especially through communication. However, it is unknown whether humans are the prime source of information for infant learning. Here we report that humans have a powerful influence on infants' object learning compared with nonhuman agents (robots). Twelve-month-old infants were shown videos in which a human or a robot gazed at an object. The results demonstrated that the infants followed the gaze direction of both agents, but only human gaze facilitated their object learning: Infants showed enhanced processing of, and preferences for, the target object gazed at by the human but not by the robot. Importantly, an extended fixation on a target object without the orientation of human gaze did not produce these effects. Together, these findings show the importance of humanness in the gazer, suggesting that infants may be predisposed to treat humans as privileged sources of information for learning.
社会学习使婴儿能够获得信息，特别是通过交流。然而，目前还不清楚人类是否是婴儿学习的主要信息来源。在这里，我们报告说，与非人类代理（机器人）相比，人类对婴儿的物体学习有很大的影响。12 个月大的婴儿观看了人类或机器人注视一个物体的视频。结果表明，婴儿跟随两个代理的注视方向，但只有人类的注视有助于他们学习物体：婴儿对人类注视的目标物体表现出增强的处理和偏好，而对机器人注视的目标物体则没有表现出增强的处理和偏好。重要的是，长时间固定在目标物体上，而没有人类注视的方向，不会产生这些效果。总之，这些发现表明了注视者的人性的重要性，这表明婴儿可能倾向于将人类视为学习的特权信息源。
