دانلود رایگان مقاله اشاره خودکار دقت مکانی مخفی توسط عاملی در کودکان پیش دبستانی و بزرگسالان

Abstract

Both infants and adults exhibit rapid, automatic reorienting of covert spatial attention in the direction indicated by familiar biological signals, such as another individual’s gaze, reaches, or points. Recent evidence in adults suggests that these cued responses can be influenced by representations of the other individual’s perceptual experiences and capacity for intentional action. However, current developmental results and theoretical accounts of the acquisition and specialization of cued responses are consistent with a cueing mechanism based on leaner representations of perceptually familiar directional signals. The influence of mentalistic attributions on cueing during early childhood is thus unknown. We investigated whether or not abstract attributions of agency to an unfamiliar entity would modulate cueing in 4- to 6-year-old children and adults. When induced to construe a faceless novel entity as an agent, both age groups fixated targets more rapidly when they appeared in locations consistent with the agent’s directional orientation; they did not do so when they had no reason to view the entity as an agent. This result provides evidence that 1) the intentional actions of a perceptually unfamiliar agent can guide attentional cueing in adults, and 2) this influence of conceptual assessment on reflexive social attention is present by early childhood.

4. Discussion

This study provides evidence that abstract attributions of intentional agency engage automatic reorienting of covert spatial attention in both preschool-aged children and adults. Children’s most rapid, automatic social behaviors do not appear to be limited to overlearned responses to specific, perceptually defined stimuli. The present results suggest that these behaviors can also be informed by children’s rich, conceptual appraisals of the entities that they encounter. The effects we observed were not due to globally heightened attention in the Socially Contingent condition. Children attended equally to each condition’s familiarization video, and adults were even slightly more interested in the NonContingent familiarization video; moreover, both ages contributed an equal number of acceptable cueing trials across conditions. Nor can perceptual learning within the study session account for this finding, as both the entity’s rotational motion and its non-predictive nature were constant across conditions. Rather, subjects were only cued by the entity’s turn when they viewed it as an intentional agent whose orientation provided a meaningful directional, and perhaps communicative, signal. This finding both supports and extends previous research on the detection and representation of intentional agents. Young children who view an entity as an intentional agent may interpret its behavior as goal directed (Johnson, Booth, & O’Hearn, 2001; Shimizu & Johnson, 2004) and produce voluntary social responses toward it, such as gaze following, imitation, and helping (Beier & Carey, 2014; Johnson et al.,2001; Johnson, Ok, & Luo, 2007; Johnson et al., 1998; Kenward & Gredebäck, 2013; Movellan & Watson, 1987). The present results suggest that in addition to these deliberate behaviors, representations of intentional agents also guide children’s most rapid, automatic social behaviors, such as the cueing of covert spatial attention. This occurs spontaneously (because subjects received neither instruction nor demonstration of the entity’s directionality) and reflexively (because subjects were explicitly told that the entity’s turns did not predict target locations).