Zhou Hui, Gao Qiyang, Chen Wei, Wei Qiaobo
Center for Brain, Mind and Education, Shaoxing University, Shaoxing, China.
Department of Psychology, Shaoxing University, Shaoxing, China.
Front Psychol. 2022 Feb 21;13:724677. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2022.724677. eCollection 2022.
Action understanding of children develops from simple associative learning to mentalizing. With the rise of embodied cognition, the role of interoception in action observation and action understanding has received more attention. From a developmental perspective, this study proposes a novel developmental model that explores how interoception promotes action understanding of children across ages. In early infancy, most actions observed in infants come from interactions with their caregivers. Babies learn about action effects through automatic interoceptive processing and interoceptive feedback. Interoception in early infancy is not fully developed, such as the not fully developed gastrointestinal tract and intestinal nervous system. Therefore, in early infancy, action understanding is based on low-level and original interoceptive information. At this stage, after observing the actions of others, infants can create mental representations or even imitate actions without external visual feedback, which requires interoception to provide internal reference information. By early childhood, children begin to infer action intentions of other people by integrating various types of information to reach the mentalizing level. Interoception processing requires the integration of multiple internal signals, which promotes the information integration ability of children. Interoception also provides inner information for reasoning about action intention. This review also discussed the neural mechanisms of interoception and possible ways by which it could promote action understanding of children. In early infancy, the central autonomic neural network (CAN) automatically processes and responds to the actions of caregivers on infants, providing interoceptive information for action understanding of infants. In infancy, the growth of the somatomotor system provides important internal reference information for observing and imitating the actions of infants. In early childhood, the development of interoception of children facilitates the integration of internal and external information, which promotes the mentalization of action understanding of children. According to the proposed developmental model of action understanding of children promoted by interoception, there are multilevel and stage-dependent characteristics that impact the role of interoception in action understanding of children.
儿童的动作理解从简单的联想学习发展到心理理论。随着具身认知的兴起，内感受在动作观察和动作理解中的作用受到了更多关注。从发展的角度来看，本研究提出了一种新颖的发展模型，探讨内感受如何促进各年龄段儿童的动作理解。在婴儿早期，婴儿观察到的大多数动作都来自与照顾者的互动。婴儿通过自动的内感受处理和内感受反馈来了解动作效果。婴儿早期的内感受尚未完全发育，比如胃肠道和肠神经系统发育不完全。因此，在婴儿早期，动作理解基于低级和原始的内感受信息。在这个阶段，婴儿在观察他人的动作后，无需外部视觉反馈就能创建心理表征甚至模仿动作，这需要内感受提供内部参考信息。到幼儿期，儿童开始通过整合各种类型的信息来推断他人的动作意图，从而达到心理理论水平。内感受处理需要整合多个内部信号，这促进了儿童的信息整合能力。内感受也为动作意图推理提供内部信息。本综述还讨论了内感受的神经机制以及它促进儿童动作理解的可能方式。在婴儿早期，中枢自主神经网络（CAN）自动处理并对照顾者对婴儿的动作做出反应，为婴儿的动作理解提供内感受信息。在婴儿期，躯体运动系统的发育为观察和模仿婴儿动作提供重要的内部参考信息。在幼儿期，儿童内感受的发展促进了内部和外部信息的整合，这促进了儿童动作理解的心理理论化。根据所提出的由内感受促进儿童动作理解的发展模型，存在多层次和阶段依赖性特征，这些特征影响内感受在儿童动作理解中的作用。
