Piantadosi Steven T, Palmeri Holly, Aslin Richard
Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, University of Rochester.
Infancy. 2018 May-Jun;23(3):310-324. doi: 10.1111/infa.12225. Epub 2018 Jan 31.
Complex systems are often built from a relatively small set of basic features or operations that can be combined in myriad ways. We investigated the developmental origins of this compositional architecture in 9-month-old infants, extending recent work that demonstrated rudimentary compositional abilities in preschoolers. Infants viewed two separate object-occlusion events that depicted a single featurechange operation. They were then tested with a combined operation to determine whether they expected the outcome of the two feature changes, even though this combination was unfamiliar. In contrast to preschoolers, infants did appear to predictively compose these simple feature-change operations. A second experiment demonstrated the ability of infants to track two operations when not combined. The failure to compose basic operations is consistent with limitations on object tracking and early numerical cognition (Feigenson & Yamaguchi, 2009). We suggest that these results can be unified via a general principle: infants have difficulty with multiple updates to a representation of an unobservable.
复杂系统通常由一组相对较少的基本特征或操作构建而成，这些基本特征或操作可以以无数种方式组合。我们研究了9个月大婴儿这种组合架构的发展起源，扩展了最近在学龄前儿童中证明了基本组合能力的研究工作。婴儿观看了两个单独的物体遮挡事件，这些事件描绘了单一的特征变化操作。然后，他们接受了一个组合操作测试，以确定他们是否预期两个特征变化的结果，即使这种组合是不熟悉的。与学龄前儿童不同，婴儿似乎并没有预测性地组合这些简单的特征变化操作。第二个实验证明了婴儿在不组合的情况下跟踪两个操作的能力。无法组合基本操作与物体跟踪和早期数字认知的局限性是一致的（费根森和山口，2009）。我们认为，这些结果可以通过一个一般原则统一起来：婴儿在对不可观察事物的表征进行多次更新时存在困难。
