语言可以引导婴儿如何认识世界

<正>语言是婴儿认识世界,发展认知能力的基础。当婴儿能够说出第一个词汇时,语言的表达和对事物的认知就建立起了强烈的连接。有观点认为对物体的命名有助于婴儿建立这种连接关系,因为婴儿常通过语言标签来识记物体各方面的特征,区分物体所属的类别。同时,语言标签也反过来影响婴儿对事物的理解。     

婴儿物理因果感知能力的发展

继Michotte(1963)用两个发生碰撞的小球对成人的物理因果理解进行研究以来,许多研究者使用该碰撞情境对婴儿的物理因果感知进行了一系列的研究,并得出了许多颇有争议的结论。本文结合近几年国外对婴儿物理因果感知能力的相关研究,阐述了婴儿感知简单物理情境中的因果关系能力的发展,评价了用来解释婴儿物理因果感知的模块理论与信息加工理论,以期对婴儿期的物理因果感知有一较全面的了解。     

核心知识系统及其对相关研究的启示

核心知识系统出现于人类个体发展和种系发展的早期,在人类复杂认知能力的发生发展中起着建构模块的作用。该文以表征物体和数量关系的两类核心知识系统的性质及二者在儿童的“数”概念形成和成人的数学思维中所起的作用为例,综述了以灵长类动物、婴儿、儿童和成人为被试的研究证据,并进而提出了核心知识系统给相关研究带来的若干启示。     

心理距离与建构水平的双向作用关系

心理距离概念源于时间建构理论,以自我为中心,参照点是此时此地自己的直接经验,并沿不同维度向外扩展,形成通常所认为的时间、空间、社会距离和假设性四个维度。本文述评了心理距离与建构水平的双向作用关系及其产生原因,即远心理距离使人采用核心、去背景化特征表征事物,近心理距离使人采用外围、背景化特征表征事物;反之,高水平建构使人感知到远心理距离,低水平建构使人感知到近心理距离。未来研究应关注非自我参照点的客观距离与建构水平的关系,以及心理距离与建构水平关系的心理物理学研究等。     

婴儿对语音和非语音的感知:认知和神经机制

婴儿听觉感知能力的发展对于他们未来的语言学习和社会化都具有重要意义。过去大量的研究主要关注语音感知方面,只有较少的研究将非语音感知纳入考虑之中,但了解非语音感知的特征和机制将有助于增加研究者对听觉加工以及儿童发育的认识。该文分别介绍了婴儿语音感知中的三种偏好——对语音、“婴儿语”和母语的偏好,并尝试着将非语音分为音乐、人类的非言语发声、环境声音三类进行阐述。通过对比这两大类声音的感知得到婴儿可能存在语音感知的左脑偏侧化和音乐感知的右脑偏侧化现象,但这也尚存争议,目前有特定领域模型、特定线索模型和脑网络模型三种理论对偏侧化现象的认知机制进行解释。     

婴儿如何认识他心：“似我”假说述评

“似我”指婴儿借助“我他对等”的认识解读他人行为、意图和心理状态,并通过他人间的互动信息推断和调整自身行为。具体表现在：婴儿能够识别出他人的模仿,能够理解他人的感知,以及提取他人的互动信息。将他人视为“似我”,需依赖动作表征、第一人称体验以及理解他人意图的作用。“似我”假说肯定了模仿与把握他人心理状态以及建立社交互动的关系,促使研究者认识到与他人保持“心理视角”的一致对提升儿童共情能力的价值,凸显了心智化课堂对学习效果的推动作用。     

婴儿社会性参照能力发展研究的进展

婴儿的社会性参照能力是个体早期发展中重要的心理能力之一,是个体经验习得的重要方式。目前关于婴儿社会性参照能力的界定有两类:即强调母婴之间以情绪信号为社会性信息进行参照和强调通过情绪、动作等外界信号进行信息参照。自八十年代以来,研究者开始对婴儿社会性参照能力的发展与表现进行研究,从不同角度考察了婴儿参照行为中对情绪信号的感知、辩识和理解及其情绪交往中的行为特点,并初步探讨了婴儿社会性参照的可能机制与过程。婴儿社会性参照能力的研究主要有视崖、陌生人情境和新异玩具三种范式。由于在理论和方法上尚存在一些值得注意的问题,婴儿社会性参照能力的研究还有待进一步深入。     

婴儿数量表征的客体档案和类比模型

人对数量的表征及其发展是心理学研究的重要问题之一。20世纪70年代以来,国外对婴儿数量表征的研究取得了一系列理论和方法的进步。文章简要介绍了婴儿数量辨别和推理能力的研究方法,对婴儿数量表征相关的理论进行了重点讨论。大量详实的证据表明,婴儿拥有一个“天生的”数量机制,这为人数学能力的发展提供了基础。     

7—12岁正常及盲童听、触觉通道大小辨别比较实验

人类感知外界事物时,视觉及触觉都起着重要作用。在排除视觉的条件下人们仅仅凭着触觉也能对物体形状及大小进行知觉,但精确度要较之视觉的为低。在实际生活中,失去视觉的人,凭着听觉也能对物体的质地和大小及远近距离进行辨别和判断。在本实验中,比较了正常儿童和盲童的听觉、触觉对物体大小的辨别能力。实验结果表明盲童通过触觉辨别物体的大小的能力是相当高的,正确率达82.6％;通过听觉(声音)辩别同质地物体的大小的正确率也达61.1％。这两者均明显优于正常儿童(视觉正常儿童)的结果。作者认为,盲童由于失去视觉,而加强触觉和听觉能力的发展,是感官补偿作用的结果。     

整体与部件表征在物体图形识别中的作用

研究通过三个实验探讨了物体表征及其对识别的影响,特别是整体与部件的关系。实验一主要研究物体整体与部件分别对物体识别的影响;实验二考察部件之间的相对距离、分割方式对物体识别的影响;实验三对自然分割和非自然分割的信息表征特点进行了进一步探讨。结果表明：（１）被试在识别被人为分成几个部分的图形时,可能运用心理操作将各部分“拼凑”起来,然后再进行识别。（２）对物体的表征是多元的,既可以通过整体特征达到对物体的识别,也可以通过局部特征识别物体。（３）部件的表征具有一定独立性,可以通过部分信息完形出整体,而不受物体熟悉度的影响。如果能够识别构成物体的部件以及确定其间的空间关系,就可以实现对物体整体的识别,但部件识别不是物体识别的绝对前提。     

Sensitivity to auditory‐tactile colocation in early infancy

An ability to detect the common location of multisensory stimulation is essential for us to perceive a coherent environment, to represent the interface between the body and the external world, and to act on sensory information. Regarding the tactile environment “at hand”, we need to represent somatosensory stimuli impinging on the skin surface in the same spatial reference frame as distal stimuli, such as those transduced by vision and audition. Across two experiments we investigated whether 6‐ (n = 14; Experiment 1) and 4‐month‐old (n = 14; Experiment 2) infants were sensitive to the colocation of tactile and auditory signals delivered to the hands. We recorded infants’ visual preferences for spatially congruent and incongruent auditory‐tactile events delivered to their hands. At 6 months, infants looked longer toward incongruent stimuli, whilst at 4 months infants looked longer toward congruent stimuli. Thus, even from 4 months of age, infants are sensitive to the colocation of simultaneously presented auditory and tactile stimuli. We conclude that 4‐ and 6‐month‐old infants can represent auditory and tactile stimuli in a common spatial frame of reference. We explain the age‐wise shift in infants’ preferences from congruent to incongruent in terms of an increased preference for novel crossmodal spatial relations based on the accumulation of experience. A comparison of looking preferences across the congruent and incongruent conditions with a unisensory control condition indicates that the ability to perceive auditory‐tactile colocation is based on a crossmodal rather than a supramodal spatial code by 6 months of age at least.     

The development of ordinal numerical knowledge in infancy

A critical question in cognitive science concerns how numerical knowledge develops. One essential component of an adult concept of number is ordinality: the greater than and less than relationships between numbers. Here it is shown in two experiments that 11-month-old infants successfully discriminated, whereas 9-month-old infants failed to discriminate, sequences of numerosities that descended in numerical value from sequences that increased in numerical value. These results suggest that by 11 months of age infants possess the ability to appreciate the greater than and less than relations between numerical values but that this ability develops between 9 and 11 months of age. In an additional experiment 9-month-old infants succeeded at discriminating the ordinal direction of sequences that varied in the size of a single square rather than in number, suggesting that a capacity for non-numerical ordinal judgments may develop before a capacity for ordinal numerical judgments. These data raise many questions about how infants represent number and what happens between 9 and 11 months to support ordinal numerical judgments.     

The perception of causality in infancy

Michotte proposed a rationalist theory of the origin of the human capacity to represent causal relations among events. He suggested that the input analyzer that underlies the causal perception in launching, entraining, and expulsion events is innate and is the ultimate source of all causal representations. We review the literature on infant causal representations, providing evidence that launching, entraining and expulsion events are interpreted causally by young infants. However, there is as of yet no good evidence that these representations are innate. Furthermore, there is considerable evidence that these representations are not the sole source of the human capacity for causal representation.     

Colour Relations in Form

The orthodox monadic determination thesis holds that we represent colour relations by virtue of representing colours. Against this orthodoxy, I argue that it is possible to represent colour relations without representing any colours. I present a model of iconic perceptual content that allows for such primitive relational colour representation, and provide four empirical arguments in its support. I close by surveying alternative views of the relationship between monadic and relational colour representation.     

Infants’ perception of musical patterns

This paper examines infants’ ability to perceive various aspects of musical material that are significant in music in general and in Western European music in particular: contour, intervals, exact pitches, diatonic structure, and rhythm. For the most part, infants focus on relational aspects of melodies, synthesizing global representations from local details. They encode the contour of a melody across variations in exact pitches and intervals. They extract information about pitch direction from the smallest musically relevant pitch change in Western music, the semitone. Under certain conditions, infants detect interval changes in the context of transposed sequences, their performance showing enhancement for sequences that conform to Western musical structure. Infants have difficulty retaining exact pitches except for sets of pitches that embody important musical relations. In the temporal domain, they group the elements of auditory sequences on the basis of similarity and they extract the temporal structure of a melody across variations in tempo.     

Evidence for mental subdivision of space by infants: 3- to 4-month-olds spontaneously bisect a small-scale area into left and right categories

Young infants have been shown to represent the left versus right spatial category relations of a target object and a vertical referent bar. In the present study, we examined whether infants would represent left versus right when the vertical bar was removed from the stimulus display. In Experiment 1, 3- to 4-month-olds who had been familiarized with stimuli depicting a diamond appearing in different locations to the left or right of the vertical midline displayed a mean novel category preference for a stimulus depicting the diamond on the opposite side of the midline. In Experiment 2, another group of 3- to 4-month-olds discriminated the within-category position changes of the diamond as it appeared to the left or right of the vertical midline. The results indicate that young infants can mentally bisect small-scale space into left versus right categories.     

Probabilistic cue combination: less is more

Learning about the structure of the world requires learning probabilistic relationships: rules in which cues do not predict outcomes with certainty. However, in some cases, the ability to track probabilistic relationships is a handicap, leading adults to perform non‐normatively in prediction tasks. For example, in the dilution effect, predictions made from the combination of two cues of different strengths are less accurate than those made from the stronger cue alone. Here we show that dilution is an adult problem; 11‐month‐old infants combine strong and weak predictors normatively. These results extend and add support for the less is more hypothesis: limited cognitive resources can lead children to represent probabilistic information differently from adults, and this difference in representation can have important downstream consequences for prediction.     

Newtonian determinism to branching space-times indeterminism in two moves

??Branching space-times?? (BST) is intended as a representation of objective, event-based indeterminism. As such, BST exhibits both a spatio-temporal aspect and an indeterministic ??modal?? aspect of alternative possible historical courses of events. An essential feature of BST is that it can also represent spatial or space-like relationships as part of its (more or less) relativistic theory of spatio-temporal relations; this ability is essential for the representation of local (in contrast with ??global??) indeterminism. This essay indicates how BST might be seen to grow out of Newton??s deterministic and non-relativistic theory by two independent moves: (1) Taking account of indeterminism, and (2) attending to spatio-temporal relationships in a spirit derived from Einstein??s theory of special relativity. Since (1) and (2) are independent, one can see that there is room for four theories: Newtonian determinism, branching time indeterminism, relativistic determinism, and (finally) branching space-times indeterminism.     

Recent Scholarship on Hume's Theory of Mental Representation

In a recent paper, Karl Schafer argues that Hume's theory of mental representation has two distinct components, unified by their shared feature of having accuracy conditions. As Schafer sees it, simple and complex ideas represent the intrinsic imagistic features of their objects whereas abstract ideas represent the relations or structures in which multiple objects stand. This distinction, however, is untenable for at least two related reasons. Firstly, complex ideas represent the relations or structures in which the impressions that are the objects of their simple components stand. Secondly, abstract ideas are themselves instances of complex ideas. I draw two important conclusions from these facts. Firstly, contra Schafer and Garrett (to whom Schafer responds), the Copy Principle, properly emended, constitutes the entirety of Hume's theory of mental representation. Secondly, whereas paradigm examples of complex ideas, e.g. ideas of spatial and temporal complexes, are structured by relations of contiguity, abstract ideas are those complex ideas instead structured by relations of resemblance. As such, they represent their objects not as spatially or temporally contiguous but rather as resembling.     

Relational memory during infancy: evidence from eye tracking

Here we report evidence from a new eye‐tracking measure of relational memory that suggests that 9‐month‐old infants can encode memories in terms of the relations among items, a function putatively subserved by the hippocampus. Infants learned about the association between faces that were superimposed on unique scenic backgrounds. During test trials, infants were shown three faces presented on a familiar scene. All three faces were equally familiar; however, one had been presented with the test background earlier. Visual behavior was recorded continuously using a TOBII eye tracker. Infants looked preferentially at the face that matched the test background very early in the trial; however, the time course of this preferential looking effect varied as a function of delay. These results suggest that by 9 months of age infants can form memories that represent the relations among items and maintain them over short delays.