The University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA 19104, USA.
Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, Chicago, IL 60611, USA.
J Exp Child Psychol. 2023 Dec;236:105754. doi: 10.1016/j.jecp.2023.105754. Epub 2023 Aug 4.
The language infants hear guides their visual attention; infants look more to objects when they are labeled. However, it is unclear whether labels also change the way infants attend to and encode those objects-that is, whether hearing an object label changes infants' online visual processing of that object. Here, we examined this question in the context of novel word learning, asking whether nuanced measures of visual attention, specifically fixation durations, change when 2-year-olds hear a label for a novel object (e.g., "Look at the dax") compared with when they hear a non-labeling phrase (e.g., "Look at that"). Results confirmed that children visually process objects differently when they are labeled, using longer fixations to examine labeled objects versus unlabeled objects. Children also showed robust retention of these labels on a subsequent test trial, suggesting that these longer fixations accompanied successful word learning. Moreover, when children were presented with the same objects again in a silent re-exposure phase, children's fixations were again longer when looking at the previously labeled objects. Finally, fixation duration at first exposure and silent re-exposure were correlated, indicating a persistent effect of language on visual processing. These effects of hearing labels on visual attention point to the critical interactions involved in cross-modal learning and emphasize the benefits of looking beyond aggregate measures of attention to identify cognitive learning mechanisms during infancy.
婴儿听到的语言引导他们的视觉注意力；当他们被贴上标签时，婴儿会更多地看物体。然而，目前尚不清楚标签是否也会改变婴儿对这些物体的注意力和编码方式，也就是说，听到一个物体的标签是否会改变婴儿对该物体的在线视觉处理。在这里，我们在新词学习的背景下研究了这个问题，询问当 2 岁的孩子听到一个新物体的标签（例如，“看 dax”）与听到一个非标签短语（例如，“看那个”）时，他们的视觉注意力是否会发生细微的变化，特别是注视持续时间。结果证实，当孩子们被贴上标签时，他们会以不同的方式对物体进行视觉处理，用更长的注视时间来检查标记物体与未标记物体。孩子们在随后的测试试验中也表现出对这些标签的强烈保留，表明这些更长的注视伴随着成功的单词学习。此外，当孩子们在无声的重新暴露阶段再次看到相同的物体时，当他们看之前标记过的物体时，他们的注视时间又再次延长。最后，首次暴露和无声再暴露时的注视持续时间呈正相关，表明语言对视觉处理有持续的影响。这些听到标签对视觉注意力的影响表明了跨模态学习中涉及的关键相互作用，并强调了超越注意力的综合衡量来识别婴儿期认知学习机制的重要性。
