Kovács Ágnes M, Tauzin Tibor, Téglás Ernő, Gergely György, Csibra Gergely
Cognitive Development Center, Central European University, Budapest, Hungary.
Cognitive Development Center, Central European University, Budapest, Hungary. ; Budapest University of Technology and Economics, Department of Cognitive Science.
Infancy. 2014 Nov 1;19(6):543-557. doi: 10.1111/infa.12060.
Infants start pointing systematically to objects or events around their first birthday. It has been proposed that infants point to an event in order to share their appreciation of it with others. In the current study, we tested another hypothesis, according to which infants' pointing could also serve as an epistemic request directed to the adult. Thus, infants' motivation for pointing could include the expectation that adults would provide new information about the referent. In two experiments, an adult reacted to 12-month-olds' pointing gestures by exhibiting 'informing' or 'sharing' behavior. In response, infants pointed more frequently across trials in the informing than in the sharing condition. This suggests that the feedback that contained new information matched infants' expectations more than mere attention sharing. Such a result is consistent with the idea that not just the comprehension but also the production of early communicative signals is tuned to assist infants' learning from others.
婴儿在一岁左右开始有目的地指向周围的物体或事件。有人提出，婴儿指向某个事件是为了与他人分享他们对该事件的认知。在当前的研究中，我们测试了另一种假设，即婴儿的指向也可以作为向成年人提出的一种认知请求。因此，婴儿指向的动机可能包括期望成年人提供有关所指对象的新信息。在两项实验中，一名成年人通过表现出“告知”或“分享”行为来回应12个月大婴儿的指向手势。作为回应，在整个实验过程中，婴儿在“告知”条件下比在“分享”条件下更频繁地指向。这表明，包含新信息的反馈比单纯的注意力分享更符合婴儿的期望。这样的结果与以下观点一致，即不仅早期交流信号的理解，而且其产生都经过调整，以帮助婴儿向他人学习。
