Outcome producing potential influences twelve-month-olds' interpretation of a novel action as goal-directed

被引:14
作者
Biro, Szilvia [1 ,2 ,3 ]
Verschoor, Stephan [2 ,3 ]
Coalter, Esther [2 ,3 ]
Leslie, Alan M. [4 ,5 ]
机构
[1] Leiden Univ, Ctr Child & Family Studies, NL-2333 AK Leiden, Netherlands
[2] Leiden Univ, Inst Psychol, NL-2333 AK Leiden, Netherlands
[3] Leiden Inst Brain & Cognit, NL-2333 AK Leiden, Netherlands
[4] Rutgers State Univ, Dept Psychol, Piscataway, NJ 08854 USA
[5] Rutgers State Univ, Ctr Cognit Sci, Piscataway, NJ 08854 USA
关键词
Action interpretation; Goal attribution; Cognitive development; LONG-TERM-MEMORY; INFANTS PERCEPTION; IMITATION; ATTRIBUTION; OBJECT; DELAY;
D O I
10.1016/j.infbeh.2014.09.004
中图分类号
B844 [发展心理学(人类心理学)];
学科分类号
040202 ;
摘要
Learning about a novel, goal-directed action is a complex process. It requires identifying the outcome of the action and linking the action to its outcome for later use in new situations to predict the action or to anticipate its outcome. We investigated the hypothesis that linking a novel action to a salient change in the environment is critical for infants to assign a goal to the novel action. We report a study in which we show that 12-month-old infants, who were provided with prior experience with a novel action accompanied with a salient visible outcome in one context, can interpret the same action as goal-directed even in the absence of the outcome in another context. Our control condition shows that prior experience with the action, but without the salient effect, does not lead to goal-directed interpretation of the novel action. We also found that, for the case of 9-month-olds infants, prior experience with the outcome producing potential of the novel action does not facilitate a goal-directed interpretation of the action. However, this failure was possibly due to difficulties with generalizing the learnt association to another context rather than with linking the action to its outcome. (C) 2014 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
引用
收藏
页码:729 / 738
页数:10
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