Begus Katarina, Bonawitz Elizabeth
University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark.
Harvard Graduate School of Education, Cambridge, MA, USA.
Commun Psychol. 2024 Aug 20;2(1):77. doi: 10.1038/s44271-024-00131-3.
This study investigates 16-month-old infants' sensitivity to the informativeness of evidence and its potential link to infants' ability to draw accurate causal inferences and predict unfolding events. Employing concurrent EEG and eye tracking, data from 66 infants revealed significantly increased theta oscillatory activity when infants expected to see causally unconfounded evidence compared to confounded evidence, suggesting heightened cognitive engagement in anticipation of informative evidence. Crucially, this difference was more pronounced in the subset of infants who later made correct predictions, suggesting that they had correctly inferred the causal structure based on the evidence presented. This research sheds light on infants' motivation to seek explanatory causal information, suggesting that even at 16 months, infants can strategically direct attention to situations conducive to acquiring informative evidence, potentially laying the groundwork for the impressive abilities of humans to rapidly acquire knowledge and develop causal theories of the world.
本研究调查了16个月大婴儿对证据信息量的敏感度及其与婴儿进行准确因果推理和预测事件发展能力的潜在联系。通过同时记录脑电图（EEG）和眼动追踪，来自66名婴儿的数据显示，与混淆证据相比，当婴儿预期会看到无因果混淆的证据时，theta振荡活动显著增加，这表明在预期获得信息丰富的证据时，认知参与度提高。至关重要的是，这种差异在后来做出正确预测的婴儿子集中更为明显，这表明他们已经根据所呈现的证据正确推断出了因果结构。这项研究揭示了婴儿寻求解释性因果信息的动机，表明即使在16个月大时，婴儿也可以策略性地将注意力导向有利于获取信息丰富证据的情境，这可能为人类快速获取知识和发展关于世界的因果理论的惊人能力奠定基础。
