Waismeyer Anna, Meltzoff Andrew N
Institute for Learning & Brain Sciences, University of Washington, Seattle, WA 98195, USA.
Institute for Learning & Brain Sciences, University of Washington, Seattle, WA 98195, USA.
J Exp Child Psychol. 2017 Oct;162:58-71. doi: 10.1016/j.jecp.2017.04.018. Epub 2017 Jun 3.
Infants learn about cause and effect through hands-on experience; however, they also can learn about causality simply from observation. Such observational causal learning is a central mechanism by which infants learn from and about other people. Across three experiments, we tested infants' observational causal learning of both social and physical causal events. Experiment 1 assessed infants' learning of a physical event in the absence of visible spatial contact between the causes and effects. Experiment 2 developed a novel paradigm to assess whether infants could learn about a social causal event from third-party observation of a social interaction between two people. Experiment 3 compared learning of physical and social events when the outcomes occurred probabilistically (happening some, but not all, of the time). Infants demonstrated significant learning in all three experiments, although learning about probabilistic cause-effect relations was most difficult. These findings about infant observational causal learning have implications for children's rapid nonverbal learning about people, things, and their causal relations.
婴儿通过亲身实践来了解因果关系；然而，他们也可以仅通过观察来学习因果关系。这种观察性因果学习是婴儿向他人学习并了解他人的一种核心机制。在三个实验中，我们测试了婴儿对社会和物理因果事件的观察性因果学习。实验1评估了婴儿在因果之间没有可见空间接触的情况下对物理事件的学习。实验2开发了一种新的范式，以评估婴儿是否可以通过对两人之间社会互动的第三方观察来学习社会因果事件。实验3比较了结果以概率方式出现（有时发生，但并非总是发生）时对物理和社会事件的学习情况。尽管学习概率性因果关系最为困难，但婴儿在所有三个实验中都表现出了显著的学习效果。这些关于婴儿观察性因果学习的发现，对于儿童快速进行关于人、事物及其因果关系的非语言学习具有启示意义。
