Monroy Claire, Meyer Marlene, Gerson Sarah, Hunnius Sabine
Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour, Radboud University Nijmegen, Nijmegen, Netherlands.
Department of Otolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery, Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center, Columbus, Ohio, United States.
PLoS One. 2017 May 5;12(5):e0177261. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0177261. eCollection 2017.
Sensitivity to the regularities and structure contained within sequential, goal-directed actions is an important building block for generating expectations about the actions we observe. Until now, research on statistical learning for actions has solely focused on individual action sequences, but many actions in daily life involve multiple actors in various interaction contexts. The current study is the first to investigate the role of statistical learning in tracking regularities between actions performed by different actors, and whether the social context characterizing their interaction influences learning. That is, are observers more likely to track regularities across actors if they are perceived as acting jointly as opposed to in parallel? We tested adults and toddlers to explore whether social context guides statistical learning and-if so-whether it does so from early in development. In a between-subjects eye-tracking experiment, participants were primed with a social context cue between two actors who either shared a goal of playing together ('Joint' condition) or stated the intention to act alone ('Parallel' condition). In subsequent videos, the actors performed sequential actions in which, for certain action pairs, the first actor's action reliably predicted the second actor's action. We analyzed predictive eye movements to upcoming actions as a measure of learning, and found that both adults and toddlers learned the statistical regularities across actors when their actions caused an effect. Further, adults with high statistical learning performance were sensitive to social context: those who observed actors with a shared goal were more likely to correctly predict upcoming actions. In contrast, there was no effect of social context in the toddler group, regardless of learning performance. These findings shed light on how adults and toddlers perceive statistical regularities across actors depending on the nature of the observed social situation and the resulting effects.
对连续的、目标导向的行动中所包含的规律和结构的敏感性，是产生对我们所观察到的行动的预期的重要基石。到目前为止，关于行动的统计学习的研究仅聚焦于单个行动序列，但日常生活中的许多行动涉及到不同互动情境中的多个参与者。当前的研究首次调查了统计学习在追踪不同参与者所执行行动之间的规律方面的作用，以及表征他们互动的社会情境是否会影响学习。也就是说，如果观察者被认为是共同行动而不是并行行动，他们是否更有可能追踪不同参与者之间的规律？我们测试了成年人和幼儿，以探究社会情境是否指导统计学习——如果是这样——是否从发育早期就开始这样做。在一项被试间眼动追踪实验中，参与者在两个参与者之间被给予一个社会情境线索，这两个参与者要么有一起玩耍的共同目标（“共同”条件），要么表明单独行动的意图（“并行”条件）。在随后的视频中，参与者执行连续的行动，对于某些行动对，第一个参与者的行动可靠地预测了第二个参与者的行动。我们分析了对即将发生的行动的预测性眼动，以此作为学习的一种度量，发现当行动产生效果时，成年人和幼儿都学习到了不同参与者之间的统计规律。此外，具有高统计学习表现的成年人对社会情境敏感：那些观察到有共同目标的参与者的人更有可能正确预测即将发生的行动。相比之下，在幼儿组中，无论学习表现如何，社会情境都没有影响。这些发现揭示了成年人和幼儿如何根据所观察到的社会情境的性质和产生的效果来感知不同参与者之间的统计规律。
