Psychology Department, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, United States.
Psychology Department, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, United States.
Prog Brain Res. 2020;254:167-186. doi: 10.1016/bs.pbr.2020.05.015. Epub 2020 Jun 16.
Previous research on perceptual and cognitive development has predominantly focused on infants' passive response to experience. For example, if infants are exposed to acoustic patterns in the background while they are engaged in another activity, what are they able to learn? However, recent work in this area has revealed that even very young infants are also capable of active perceptual and cognitive responses to experience. Specifically, recent neuroimaging work showed that infants' perceptual systems predict upcoming sensory events and that learning to predict new events rapidly modulates the responses of their perceptual systems. In addition, there is new evidence that young infants have access to endogenous attention and their prediction and attention are rapidly and robustly modified through learning about patterns in the environment. In this chapter, we present a synthesis of the existing research on the impact of infants' active responses to experience and argue that this active engagement importantly supports infants' perceptual-cognitive development. To this end, we first define what a mechanism of active engagement is and examine how learning, selective attention, and prediction can be considered active mechanisms. Then, we argue that these active mechanisms become engaged in response to higher-order environmental structures, such as temporal, spatial, and relational patterns, and review both behavioral and neural evidence of infants' active responses to these structures or patterns. Finally, we discuss how this active engagement in infancy may give rise to the emergence of specialized perceptual-cognitive systems and highlight directions for future research.
先前有关感知和认知发展的研究主要集中在婴儿对经验的被动反应上。例如，如果婴儿在从事其他活动时，背景中出现了声音模式，他们能学到什么呢？然而，该领域最近的研究揭示了即使是非常年幼的婴儿也能够对经验做出积极的感知和认知反应。具体来说，最近的神经影像学研究表明，婴儿的感知系统可以预测即将到来的感觉事件，并且通过快速学习预测新事件来调节他们的感知系统的反应。此外，有新的证据表明，幼儿可以利用内源性注意，并且他们的预测和注意可以通过学习环境中的模式而迅速且强烈地改变。在本章中，我们综合了现有关于婴儿对经验的积极反应的研究，并认为这种积极参与对婴儿的感知认知发展至关重要。为此，我们首先定义了什么是积极参与的机制，并探讨了学习、选择性注意和预测如何被视为积极的机制。然后，我们认为这些积极的机制是为了响应更高阶的环境结构而被激活的，例如时间、空间和关系模式，并回顾了婴儿对这些结构或模式的积极反应的行为和神经证据。最后，我们讨论了婴儿期的这种积极参与如何导致专门的感知认知系统的出现，并强调了未来研究的方向。
