Kotovsky L, Baillargeon R
Department of Psychology, University of Illinois, Champaign 61820, USA.
Cognition. 1998 Jul 15;67(3):311-51. doi: 10.1016/s0010-0277(98)00036-5.
Previous research indicates that, when shown a collision between a moving and a stationary object, 11-month-old infants believe that the size of the moving object affects how far the stationary object is displaced. The present experiments examined whether 6.5- and 5.5-month-old infants hold the same belief. The infants sat in front of a horizontal track; to the left of the track was an inclined ramp. A wheeled toy bug rested on the track at the bottom of the ramp. The infants were habituated to an event in which a medium-size cylinder rolled down the ramp and hit the bug, propelling it to the middle of the track. Next, the infants saw two test events in which novel cylinders propelled the bug to the end of the track. The two novel cylinders were identical to the habituation cylinder in material but not in size: one was larger (large-cylinder event) and one was smaller (small-cylinder event) than the habituation cylinder. The 6.5-month-old infants, and the 5.5-month-old female infants, looked reliably longer at the small- than at the large-cylinder event. These and control results indicated that the infants (a) believed that the size of the cylinder affected the length of the bug's trajectory and (b) used the habituation event to calibrate their predictions about the test events. Unlike the other infants, the 5.5-month-old male infants tended to look equally at the small- and large-cylinder events. Further results indicated that this negative finding was not due to the infants' (a) failure to remember how far the bug rolled in the habituation event or (b) inability to use the habituation event to calibrate predictions about novel test events. Together, the present results suggest the following conclusions. First, when shown a collision between a moving and a stationary object, infants aged 5.5-6.5 months (a) believe that there is a proportional relation between the size of the moving object and the distance traveled by the stationary object and (b) can engage in calibration-based reasoning about this size/distance relation. Second, female infants precede males by a few weeks in this development, for reasons that may be related to sex differences in the maturation of depth perception.
先前的研究表明，当向11个月大的婴儿展示一个移动的物体与一个静止的物体发生碰撞时，他们认为移动物体的大小会影响静止物体被推动的距离。本实验研究了6.5个月大和5.5个月大的婴儿是否也有同样的认知。婴儿们坐在一条水平轨道前；轨道左侧是一个倾斜的坡道。一个带轮子的玩具虫子停在坡道底部的轨道上。婴儿们先习惯了一个事件：一个中等大小的圆柱体滚下斜坡，撞到虫子，将其推到轨道中间。接下来，婴儿们看到了两个测试事件，其中新的圆柱体将虫子推到轨道尽头。这两个新圆柱体在材质上与习惯化圆柱体相同，但大小不同：一个比习惯化圆柱体大（大圆柱体事件），一个比习惯化圆柱体小（小圆柱体事件）。6.5个月大的婴儿以及5.5个月大的女婴，注视小圆柱体事件的时间明显长于大圆柱体事件。这些结果以及对照结果表明，婴儿们（a）认为圆柱体的大小会影响虫子轨迹的长度，并且（b）利用习惯化事件来校准他们对测试事件的预测。与其他婴儿不同，5.5个月大的男婴倾向于对小圆柱体事件和大圆柱体事件注视的时间相同。进一步的结果表明，这一负面发现并非由于婴儿们（a）未能记住虫子在习惯化事件中滚动的距离，或者（b）无法利用习惯化事件来校准对新测试事件的预测。总体而言，目前的结果表明了以下结论。第一，当向5.5 - 6.5个月大的婴儿展示一个移动的物体与一个静止的物体发生碰撞时，（a）他们认为移动物体的大小与静止物体移动的距离之间存在比例关系，并且（b）能够基于校准对这种大小/距离关系进行推理。第二，女婴在这一发展过程中比男婴早几周，原因可能与深度感知成熟过程中的性别差异有关。
