University of Washington, United States.
Temple University, United States.
Infant Behav Dev. 2020 Feb;58:101425. doi: 10.1016/j.infbeh.2020.101425. Epub 2020 Feb 10.
Infants must learn to carve events at their joints to best understand who is doing what to whom or whether an object or agent has reached its intended goal. Recent behavioral research demonstrates that infants do not see the world as a movie devoid of meaning, but rather as a series of sub-events that include agents moving in different manners along paths from sources to goals. This research uses behavioral and electrophysiological methods to investigate infants' (10-14 months) attention to disruptions within relatively unfamiliar human action that does not rely on goal-objects to signal attainment (i.e., Olympic figure skating). Infants' visual (Study 1, N = 48) and neurophysiological (Study 2, N = 21) responses to pauses at starting points, endpoints, and within-action locations were recorded. Both measures revealed differential responses to pauses at endpoints relative to pauses elsewhere in the action (i.e., starting point; within-action). Eye-tracking data indicated that infants' visual attention was greater for events containing pauses at endpoints relative to events with pauses at starting points or within-actions. ERP activity reflecting perceptual processes in early-latency windows (<200 ms) and memory updating processes in long-latency windows (700-1000 ms) showed differential activation to disruptions at the end of a figure-skating action compared to other locations. Mid-latency windows (250-750 ms), in contrast, showed enhanced activation at frontal regions across conditions, suggesting electrophysiological resources may have been recruited to encode disruptions within unfamiliar dynamic human action. Combined, results hint at broad sensitivity to endpoints as a mechanism that supports infants' proclivity for carving continuous and complex event streams into meaningful units. Findings have potential implications for language development as these units are mapped onto budding linguistic representations. We discuss empirical and methodological contributions for action perception and address potential merits and pitfalls of applying behavioral techniques in conjunction with brain-based measures to study infant development.
婴儿必须学会在他们的关节处描绘事件，以最好地理解谁在对谁做什么，或者一个物体或主体是否达到了它的预期目标。最近的行为研究表明，婴儿不会将世界视为一部没有意义的电影，而是将其视为一系列包括主体以不同方式沿着从源到目标的路径移动的子事件。这项研究使用行为和电生理方法来研究婴儿（10-14 个月）对相对不熟悉的人类行为中断的注意力，这些行为中断不依赖于目标物体来表示实现（即，奥林匹克花样滑冰）。记录了婴儿对起始点、终点和动作内位置暂停的视觉（研究 1，N=48）和神经生理（研究 2，N=21）反应。这两种测量方法都显示了对动作终点处暂停的反应与动作其他位置暂停的反应的差异（即起始点；动作内）。眼动追踪数据表明，与在起始点或动作内发生暂停的事件相比，包含终点暂停的事件中，婴儿的视觉注意力更大。反映早期潜伏期窗口（<200ms）内感知过程和长潜伏期窗口（700-1000ms）内记忆更新过程的 ERP 活动显示，与其他位置相比，花样滑冰动作终点处的中断会引起不同的激活。相比之下，中期潜伏期窗口（250-750ms）在所有条件下都在前额区域显示出增强的激活，这表明电生理资源可能被招募来编码不熟悉的动态人类行为中的中断。综合起来，结果暗示了对终点的广泛敏感性是支持婴儿将连续复杂的事件流分割成有意义的单元的一种机制。这些发现对语言发展具有潜在意义，因为这些单元被映射到萌芽的语言表示上。我们讨论了动作感知的经验和方法贡献，并探讨了将行为技术与基于大脑的测量相结合应用于研究婴儿发育的潜在优点和陷阱。
