Venditti Julia A, Murrugarra Emma, McLean Celia R, Goldstein Michael H
Department of Psychology, Cornell University, 270 Uris Hall, Ithaca, NY, United States.
Department of Psychology, Cornell University, 270 Uris Hall, Ithaca, NY, United States.
Adv Child Dev Behav. 2023;65:99-134. doi: 10.1016/bs.acdb.2023.05.007. Epub 2023 Jun 8.
One of the most important challenges for a developing infant is learning how best to allocate their attention and forage for information in the midst of a great deal of novel stimulation. We propose that infants of altricial species solve this challenge by learning selectively from events that are contingent on their immature behavior, such as babbling. Such a contingency filter would focus attention and learning on the behavior of social partners, because social behavior reliably fits infants' sensitivity to contingency. In this way a contingent response by a caregiver to an immature behavior becomes a source of learnable information - feedback - to the infant. Social interactions with responsive caregivers afford infants opportunities to explore the impacts of their immature behavior on their environment, which facilitates the development of socially guided learning. Furthermore, contingent interactions are opportunities to make and test predictions about the efficacy of their social behaviors and those of others. In this chapter, we will use prelinguistic vocal learning to exemplify how infants use their developing vocal abilities to elicit learnable information about language from their social partners. Specifically, we review how caregivers' contingent responses to babbling create information that facilitates infant vocal learning and drives the development of communication. Infants play an active role in this process, as their developing predictions about the consequences of their actions serve to further refine their allocation of attention and drive increases in the maturity of their vocal behavior.
对于发育中的婴儿来说，最重要的挑战之一是学习如何在大量新异刺激中最佳地分配注意力并搜寻信息。我们提出，晚成雏物种的婴儿通过从依赖于其不成熟行为（如咿呀学语）的事件中进行选择性学习来应对这一挑战。这样一种偶然性过滤器会将注意力和学习聚焦于社会伙伴的行为，因为社会行为与婴儿对偶然性的敏感度可靠地契合。通过这种方式，照料者对不成熟行为的偶然性反应就成为了婴儿可学习的信息来源——反馈。与反应灵敏的照料者进行社会互动，为婴儿提供了探索其不成熟行为对环境影响的机会，这有助于社会引导学习的发展。此外，偶然性互动是对自己及他人社会行为的功效进行预测并加以检验的机会。在本章中，我们将以语言前的发声学习为例，说明婴儿如何利用其不断发展的发声能力，从社会伙伴那里引出有关语言的可学习信息。具体而言，我们将回顾照料者对咿呀学语的偶然性反应如何创造出有助于婴儿发声学习并推动交流发展的信息。婴儿在这一过程中发挥着积极作用，因为他们对自身行为后果不断发展的预测有助于进一步优化其注意力分配，并推动其发声行为成熟度的提高。
