Department Psychology, Developmental Psychology, Ludwig Maximilians-Universität München, Leopoldstr. 13, 80802, Munich, Germany.
Department Psychology, General and Experimental Psychology, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universtität München, Munich, Germany.
Cogn Process. 2021 Aug;22(3):515-528. doi: 10.1007/s10339-021-01015-8. Epub 2021 Mar 24.
Recent theories stress the role of situational information in understanding others' behaviour. For example, the predictive coding framework assumes that people take contextual information into account when anticipating other's actions. Likewise, the teleological stance theory assumes an early developing ability to consider situational constraints in action prediction. The current study investigates, over a wide age range, whether humans flexibly integrate situational constraints in their action anticipations. By means of an eye-tracking experiment, 2-year-olds, 5-year-olds, younger and older adults (together N = 181) observed an agent repeatedly taking one of two paths to reach a goal. Then, this path became blocked, and for test trials only the other path was passable. Results demonstrated that in test trials younger and older adults anticipated that the agent would take the continuous path, indicating that they took the situational constraints into account. In contrast, 2- and 5-year-olds anticipated that the agent would take the blocked path, indicating that they still relied on the agent's previous observed behaviour and-contrary to claims by the teleological stance theory-did not take the situational constraints into account. The results highlight developmental changes in human's ability to include situational constraints in their visual anticipations. Overall, the study contributes to theories on predictive coding and the development of action understanding.
最近的理论强调了情境信息在理解他人行为中的作用。例如，预测编码框架假设人们在预测他人的行为时会考虑上下文信息。同样，目的论立场理论假设人类有一种早期发展的能力，可以在行为预测中考虑情境限制。本研究在广泛的年龄范围内考察了人类是否能够灵活地将情境限制纳入其行为预测中。通过眼动实验，2 岁、5 岁、年轻和年长的成年人（共 181 人）观察了一个代理反复选择两条路径中的一条到达目标。然后，这条路径被封锁，在测试试验中只有另一条路径是可通行的。结果表明，在测试试验中，年轻和年长的成年人预计代理人会走连续的路径，这表明他们考虑了情境限制。相比之下，2 岁和 5 岁的孩子预计代理人会走被封锁的路径，这表明他们仍然依赖于代理人之前观察到的行为，并且——与目的论立场理论的说法相反——没有考虑情境限制。研究结果强调了人类在将情境限制纳入视觉预测能力方面的发展变化。总的来说，该研究为预测编码理论和动作理解的发展提供了新的见解。
