| Popis: |
Infants’ learning hinges on early-emerging ability to interpret complex, dynamic human action: they not only recognize many actions, but predict, respond to, remember, and draw inferences from them. Such fluency depends on finding structure within unfolding activity, including identifying boundaries where units of action begin and end. Given that action unfolds rapidly and is just as quickly gone, how do infants identify such boundaries in the complex, fleeting stream of motion that they actually observe? Caregivers’ infant-directed action demonstrations might assist with this challenging learning task. In interactions with infants, caregivers modify their motion in a variety of ways that engage infants’ overall attention (i.e., “motionese;” Brand, Baldwin, & Ashburn, 2002). It seems plausible that these modifications promote infants’ detection of internal structure within dynamic activity. We harnessed pupillometry to investigate this possibility, comparing pupil size changes elicited when infants watched motionese versus adult-directed versions of a given activity stream. Infants’ pupil size (an indication of attention or cognitive engagement) increased in response to action boundaries, but only for motionese demonstrations. Thus, in addition to engaging overall attention, motionese facilitates infants’ detection of action’s internal structure. These findings showcase benefits of motionese for infants’ learning about action, and pupillometry for shining light on key developmental phenomena. |
