Kunin Linette, Piccolo Sabrina H, Saxe Rebecca, Liu Shari
Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA.
Department of Psychology, Northeastern University, Boston, MA, USA.
Nat Hum Behav. 2024 Dec;8(12):2342-2356. doi: 10.1038/s41562-024-01965-x. Epub 2024 Oct 14.
Human infants are born with their eyes open and an otherwise limited motor repertoire; thus, studies measuring infant looking are commonly used to investigate the developmental origins of perception and cognition. However, scholars have long expressed concerns about the reliability and interpretation of looking behaviours. We evaluated these concerns using a pre-registered ( https://osf.io/jghc3 ), systematic meta-analysis of 76 published and unpublished studies of infants' early physical and psychological reasoning (total n = 1,899; 3- to 12-month-old infants; database search and call for unpublished studies conducted July to August 2022). We studied two effects in the same datasets: looking towards expected versus unexpected events (violation of expectation (VOE)) and looking towards visually familiar versus visually novel events (perceptual novelty (PN)). Most studies implemented methods to minimize the risk of bias (for example, ensuring that experimenters were naive to the conditions and reporting inter-rater reliability). There was mixed evidence about publication bias for the VOE effect. Most centrally to our research aims, we found that these two effects varied systematically-with roughly equal effect sizes (VOE, standardized mean difference 0.290 and 95% confidence interval (0.208, 0.372); PN, standardized mean difference 0.239 and 95% confidence interval (0.109, 0.369))-but independently, based on different predictors. Age predicted infants' looking responses to unexpected events, but not visually novel events. Habituation predicted infants' looking responses to visually novel events, but not unexpected events. From these findings, we suggest that conceptual and perceptual novelty independently influence infants' looking behaviour.
人类婴儿出生时眼睛是睁开的，但运动能力有限；因此，测量婴儿注视的研究通常用于探究感知和认知的发展起源。然而，长期以来学者们一直对注视行为的可靠性和解读表示担忧。我们通过一项预先注册（https://osf.io/jghc3）的系统荟萃分析评估了这些担忧，该分析涵盖了76项已发表和未发表的关于婴儿早期身体和心理推理的研究（总样本量n = 1899；3至12个月大的婴儿；2022年7月至8月进行数据库搜索并征集未发表的研究）。我们在同一数据集中研究了两种效应：注视预期事件与意外事件（违背预期（VOE））以及注视视觉上熟悉的事件与视觉上新奇的事件（感知新奇性（PN））。大多数研究采用了方法来最小化偏差风险（例如，确保实验者对条件不知情并报告评分者间信度）。关于VOE效应的发表偏倚存在混杂的证据。对于我们的研究目标最为关键的是，我们发现这两种效应系统地变化——效应大小大致相等（VOE，标准化平均差为0.290，95%置信区间为(0.208, 0.372)；PN，标准化平均差为0.239，95%置信区间为(0.109, 0.369)）——但基于不同的预测因素独立变化。年龄预测了婴儿对意外事件的注视反应，但不能预测对视觉上新奇事件的反应。习惯化预测了婴儿对视觉上新奇事件的注视反应，但不能预测对意外事件的反应。基于这些发现，我们认为概念新奇性和感知新奇性独立地影响婴儿的注视行为。
