Department of Psychology, University of Milano-Bicocca, Milano, Italy.
NeuroMI, Milan Center for Neuroscience, Milano, Italy.
Infancy. 2022 May;27(3):479-491. doi: 10.1111/infa.12463. Epub 2022 Mar 3.
Infants are capable of extracting statistical regularities from continuous streams of elements, which helps them structuring their surrounding environment. The current study examines 12-month-olds' capacity to extract statistical information from a sequence of emotional faces. Using a familiarization procedure, infants were presented with videos of two actresses expressing the same facial emotion, and subsequently turning toward or away from each other. Videos displayed different emotions (i.e., anger, happiness, fear, sadness, surprise, amusement, disgust, and exasperation) and were organized sequentially, so that the transitional probabilities between videos were highly predictable in some cases, and less predictable in others. At test, infants discriminated highly predictable from low predictable transitional probabilities, suggesting that they extracted statistical regularities from the sequence of emotional faces. However, when examining the looking toward and the looking away conditions separately, infants showed evidence of statistical learning in the looking toward condition only. Together, these findings suggest that 12-month-old infants rely on statistical learning to segment a continuous sequence of emotional faces, although this ability can be modulated by the nature of the stimuli. The contribution of statistical learning to structure infants' social environment is discussed.
婴儿能够从连续的元素流中提取统计规律，这有助于他们构建周围的环境。本研究考察了 12 个月大的婴儿从一系列情绪面孔中提取统计信息的能力。通过熟悉程序，婴儿观看了两位女演员表达相同面部表情的视频，然后彼此相向或相背。视频展示了不同的情绪（即愤怒、快乐、恐惧、悲伤、惊讶、娱乐、厌恶和恼怒），并按顺序排列，因此在某些情况下，视频之间的转换概率是高度可预测的，而在其他情况下则不太可预测。在测试中，婴儿区分了高度可预测和低度可预测的转换概率，这表明他们从情绪面孔的序列中提取了统计规律。然而，当分别检查朝向和背离条件时，婴儿仅在朝向条件下表现出统计学习的证据。总之，这些发现表明，12 个月大的婴儿依赖于统计学习来分割连续的情绪面孔序列，尽管这种能力可以被刺激的性质所调节。讨论了统计学习对婴儿社会环境结构的贡献。
