Parise Eugenio, Csibra Gergely
Cognitive Development Center, Central European University, Budapest.
PLoS One. 2013 Aug 19;8(8):e72360. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0072360. eCollection 2013.
Infants' sensitivity to ostensive signals, such as direct eye contact and infant-directed speech, is well documented in the literature. We investigated how infants interpret such signals by assessing common processing mechanisms devoted to them and by measuring neural responses to their compounds. In Experiment 1, we found that ostensive signals from different modalities display overlapping electrophysiological activity in 5-month-old infants, suggesting that these signals share neural processing mechanisms independently of their modality. In Experiment 2, we found that the activation to ostensive signals from different modalities is not additive to each other, but rather reflects the presence of ostension in either stimulus stream. These data support the thesis that ostensive signals obligatorily indicate to young infants that communication is directed to them.
婴儿对诸如直接眼神接触和儿向言语等明示信号的敏感性在文献中有充分记载。我们通过评估专门用于这些信号的常见加工机制以及测量对其组合的神经反应，来研究婴儿如何解读这些信号。在实验1中，我们发现来自不同模态的明示信号在5个月大的婴儿中显示出重叠的电生理活动，这表明这些信号共享神经加工机制，而与它们的模态无关。在实验2中，我们发现对来自不同模态的明示信号的激活并非彼此相加，而是反映了任一刺激流中明示的存在。这些数据支持了这样一种观点，即明示信号必然向幼儿表明交流是针对他们的。
