Early Childhood Cognition Lab, Department of Psychology, Center for Child and Family Wellbeing, University of Washington , Seattle, WA , USA.
Front Public Health. 2015 Feb 23;3:32. doi: 10.3389/fpubh.2015.00032. eCollection 2015.
Planning actions in anticipation of object weight is fundamental to skilled action production. The present study investigated whether infants can apply weight information gained from direct actions on objects in order to plan their actions according to object weight in a novel and indirect motor context. In the present study, two groups of 12-month-old infants were provided with experience acting directly on two blocks of different weights and colors (70 versus 470 g; red versus yellow). Subsequently, infants were administered a novel task in which the same blocks (standard condition; n = 60), or blocks of the reversed color-weight pairings (switch condition; n = 60), were placed out-of-reach, on top of a cloth, and infants were encouraged to retrieve the block by acting on the cloth. Infants in the switch condition produced more failed cloth pulls when retrieving the 470 g block, due to inadequate generation of anticipatory force, relative to infants in the standard condition. This demonstrates that infants' force on the cloth was prospectively generated based on their mental representation of the supported block's weight, which was formed through their previous direct actions on the object. Thus, infants use information about the weight of an object in order to anticipate how to obtain that object in a novel and indirect problem-solving context.
预期物体重量的动作规划对于熟练的动作产生至关重要。本研究旨在调查婴儿是否能够将通过直接作用于物体获得的重量信息应用于根据物体重量在新的间接运动情境中规划动作。在本研究中，两组 12 个月大的婴儿分别经历了直接作用于两个不同重量和颜色的方块（70 克与 470 克；红色与黄色）的动作。随后，婴儿接受了一项新的任务，在该任务中，同一方块（标准条件；n=60）或颜色-重量配对相反的方块（转换条件；n=60）被放置在无法触及的位置，用布覆盖，鼓励婴儿通过作用于布来取回方块。在转换条件下，当婴儿试图取回 470 克的方块时，由于预期力量不足，产生更多的拉布失败，这一结果与标准条件下的婴儿相比有所不同。这表明，婴儿对布的拉力是基于他们对支撑方块重量的心理表征而前瞻性地产生的，而这种心理表征是通过他们之前对物体的直接作用形成的。因此，婴儿使用物体的重量信息来预测在新的、间接的解决问题情境中如何获取该物体。
