Mascaro Olivier, Csibra Gergely
Central European University, Department of Cognitive Science, Cognitive Development Center.
Psychol Sci. 2014 Jan;25(1):250-5. doi: 10.1177/0956797613500509. Epub 2013 Nov 12.
We tested 15-month-olds' capacity to represent social-dominance hierarchies with more than two agents. Our results showed that infants found it harder to memorize dominance relations that were presented in an order that hindered the incremental formation of a single structure (Study 1). These results suggest that infants attempt to build structures incrementally, relation by relation, thereby simplifying the complex problem of recognizing a social structure. Infants also found circular dominance structures harder to process than linear dominance structures (Study 2). These expectations about the shape of structures may facilitate learning. Our results suggest that infants attempt to represent social structures composed of social relations. They indicate that human infants go beyond learning about individual social partners and their respective relations and form hypotheses about how social groups are organized.
我们测试了15个月大婴儿表征包含两个以上主体的社会等级制度的能力。我们的研究结果表明，婴儿发现更难记住以阻碍单一结构逐步形成的顺序呈现的支配关系（研究1）。这些结果表明婴儿试图逐个关系地逐步构建结构，从而简化识别社会结构这一复杂问题。婴儿还发现循环支配结构比线性支配结构更难处理（研究2）。这些对结构形状方面的预期可能有助于学习。我们的研究结果表明婴儿试图表征由社会关系组成社会结构。这些结果表明人类婴儿不仅仅是了解个体社会伙伴及其各自的关系，还会对社会群体的组织方式形成假设。
