Department of Otolaryngology, The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center, Columbus, Ohio, USA.
Nationwide Children's Hospital, Columbus, Ohio, USA.
Dev Sci. 2021 May;24(3):e13042. doi: 10.1111/desc.13042. Epub 2020 Oct 19.
Social interactions provide a crucial context for early learning and cognitive development during infancy. Action prediction-the ability to anticipate an observed action-facilitates successful, coordinated interaction and is an important social-cognitive skill in early development. However, current knowledge about infant action prediction comes largely from screen-based laboratory tasks. We know little about what infants' action prediction skills look like during real-time, free-flowing interactions with a social partner. In the current study, we used head-mounted eyetracking to quantify 9-month-old infants' visual anticipations of their parents' actions during free-flowing parent-child play. Our findings reveal that infants do anticipate their parents' actions during dynamic interactions at rates significantly higher than would be expected by chance. In addition, the frequency with which they do so is associated with child-led joint attention and hand-eye coordination. These findings are the first to reveal infants' action prediction behaviors in a more naturalistic context than prior screen-based studies, and they support the idea that action prediction is inherently linked to motor development and plays an important role in infants' social-cognitive development. A video abstract of this article can be viewed at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9HrmcicfiqE.
社交互动为婴儿期的早期学习和认知发展提供了至关重要的背景。动作预测——即预测观察到的动作的能力——促进了成功的、协调的互动，是早期发展中的一项重要社会认知技能。然而，目前关于婴儿动作预测的知识主要来自基于屏幕的实验室任务。我们对婴儿在与社交伙伴进行实时、自由流畅的互动时的动作预测技能了解甚少。在当前的研究中，我们使用头戴式眼动追踪来量化 9 个月大的婴儿在自由流畅的亲子游戏中对父母动作的视觉预期。我们的发现表明，婴儿在动态互动中确实会预测父母的动作，其预测的频率明显高于随机预测的频率。此外，他们这样做的频率与儿童主导的共同注意力和手眼协调有关。这些发现首次揭示了婴儿在比基于屏幕的先前研究更自然的环境中的动作预测行为，并且支持这样一种观点，即动作预测与运动发展密切相关，在婴儿的社会认知发展中起着重要作用。本文的视频摘要可在 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9HrmcicfiqE 观看。
