Cao Qiong, Mears Anna, Feigenson Lisa
Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland, USA.
Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA.
Infancy. 2025 Mar-Apr;30(2):e70015. doi: 10.1111/infa.70015.
Seeing adults use cellphones is a common daily experience for infants, yet little is known about how infants think about others' cellphone use. Do infants recognize that phone usage can affect the user's behavior? Here we asked whether infants expect a person's task performance to be impaired by phone use. Twenty-month-old infants watched adults building block towers. One adult did this while also using a phone, either looking at the screen and scrolling (Experiment 1; N = 24) or simply talking (Experiment 2; N = 24). Across both experiments, infants looked longer when the person who had been using the phone built a taller tower than the person who had not been using the phone, compared to the reverse. This suggests that infants expected phone usage to negatively impact performance. Thus, early in development, children recognize that cell phone use can affect people's goal-directed actions; this may be one example of a broader understanding of the impact of multitasking on performance.
婴儿每天都会看到成年人使用手机，但对于婴儿如何看待他人使用手机却知之甚少。婴儿是否认识到使用手机会影响使用者的行为？在这里，我们探讨了婴儿是否认为使用手机会影响一个人的任务表现。20个月大的婴儿观看成年人搭建积木塔。其中一名成年人在搭建积木塔的同时还使用手机，要么看着屏幕滚动浏览（实验1；N = 24），要么只是打电话（实验2；N = 24）。在这两个实验中，与未使用手机的人搭建的积木塔相比，当使用手机的人搭建出更高的积木塔时，婴儿注视的时间更长。这表明婴儿认为使用手机会对表现产生负面影响。因此，在发育早期，儿童就认识到使用手机会影响人们的目标导向行为；这可能是对多任务处理对表现的影响有更广泛理解的一个例子。
