Dipartimento Di Psicologia Dello Sviluppo E Della Socializzazione, Università Degli Studi Di Padova, Via Venezia 8, 35131, Padua, PD, Italy.
CIMeC, Center for Mind/Brain Sciences, Università Degli Studi Di Trento, Trento, Italy.
Sci Rep. 2021 Jan 12;11(1):542. doi: 10.1038/s41598-020-79451-3.
The human visual system can discriminate between animate beings vs. inanimate objects on the basis of some kinematic cues, such as starting from rest and speed changes by self-propulsion. The ontogenetic origin of such capability is still under debate. Here we investigate for the first time whether newborns manifest an attentional bias toward objects that abruptly change their speed along a trajectory as contrasted with objects that move at a constant speed. To this end, we systematically manipulated the motion speed of two objects. An object that moves with a constant speed was contrasted with an object that suddenly increases (Experiment 1) or with one that suddenly decreases its speed (Experiment 2). When presented with a single speed change, newborns did not show any visual preference. However, newborns preferred an object that abruptly increases and then decreases its speed (Experiment 3), but they did not show any visual preference for the reverse sequence pattern (Experiment 4). Overall, results are discussed in line with the hypothesis of the existence of attentional biases in newborns that trigger their attention towards some visual cues of motion that characterized animate perception in adults.
人类视觉系统可以根据一些运动学线索区分有生命的物体和无生命的物体，例如从静止状态开始和由自身推进引起的速度变化。这种能力的发生起源仍存在争议。在这里，我们首次研究了新生儿是否表现出对沿着轨迹突然改变速度的物体的注意力偏向，而不是对以恒定速度移动的物体的注意力偏向。为此，我们系统地操纵了两个物体的运动速度。与以恒定速度移动的物体相比，一个物体突然增加（实验 1）或突然降低速度（实验 2）。当呈现单一速度变化时，新生儿没有表现出任何视觉偏好。然而，新生儿更喜欢突然增加然后降低速度的物体（实验 3），但他们对相反的顺序模式没有表现出任何视觉偏好（实验 4）。总的来说，结果与新生儿存在注意力偏向的假设一致，这些偏向会引发他们对运动的某些视觉线索的注意，这些线索是成年人感知有生命物体的特征。
