Department of Psychology, Princeton University, USA.
Strong Analytics, Chicago, IL, USA.
Dev Cogn Neurosci. 2019 Feb;35:66-74. doi: 10.1016/j.dcn.2017.09.006. Epub 2017 Sep 29.
Infants' experiences are defined by the presence of concurrent streams of perceptual information in social environments. Touch from caregivers is an especially pervasive feature of early development. Using three lab experiments and a corpus of naturalistic caregiver-infant interactions, we examined the relevance of touch in supporting infants' learning of structure in an altogether different modality: audition. In each experiment, infants listened to sequences of sine-wave tones following the same abstract pattern (e.g., ABA or ABB) while receiving time-locked touch sequences from an experimenter that provided either informative or uninformative cues to the pattern (e.g., knee-elbow-knee or knee-elbow-elbow). Results showed that intersensorily redundant touch supported infants' learning of tone patterns, but learning varied depending on the typicality of touch sequences in infants' lives. These findings suggest that infants track touch sequences from moment to moment and in aggregate from their caregivers, and use the intersensory redundancy provided by touch to discover patterns in their environment.
婴儿的体验是由社会环境中同时存在的感知信息流所定义的。来自照顾者的触摸是早期发展的一个特别普遍的特征。本研究使用了三个实验室实验和一系列自然发生的照顾者-婴儿互动的语料库，研究了触摸在支持婴儿以完全不同的方式（即听觉）学习结构方面的相关性。在每个实验中，婴儿在听到遵循相同抽象模式（例如，ABA 或 ABB）的正弦波音调序列的同时，会从实验者那里接收时间锁定的触摸序列，这些触摸序列提供了有关模式的信息或非信息线索（例如，膝-肘-膝或膝-肘-肘）。结果表明，感觉间冗余的触摸支持婴儿学习音调模式，但学习情况因婴儿生活中触摸序列的典型性而异。这些发现表明，婴儿会实时跟踪来自照顾者的触摸序列，并从整体上进行跟踪，并且利用触摸提供的感觉间冗余来发现环境中的模式。
