The relationship between experience and knowledge is one of the oldest and deepest questions in psychology. In developmental science, research on this question has focused on prereaching infants who cannot yet retrieve objects by reaching for and grasping them. Over the past 2 decades, behavioral research in this population has produced two seemingly contradictory findings: After first-person experience with reaching via "sticky mittens" training, (a) infants come to expect that people reach efficiently, toward goal objects, but (b) under some conditions, they can express these expectations without training. We hypothesize that prereaching infants' understanding of other people's actions is driven by the representational demands of the tasks used to test their abilities, rather than by first-person motor experience per se. We conducted a qualitative review and a quantitative, preregistered "mega-analysis" of the original data from this past work (i.e., an analysis of looking responses from N = 650 infants, 30 conditions, and 8 articles). We found that the manipulations with the strongest effects (measured via effect sizes and Bayes factors) on infants' understanding of other people's goals and physical constraints, controlling for infant age, were abstract features of action: Whether the action produced an observable effect in the world on contact and provided unambiguous evidence for the actor's goal. We end by presenting a broad hypothesis about how young infants learn about other people's minds and actions, centered on an early intuitive theory of action planning, to be tested with future work. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

中文翻译：

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先知后行：对学前婴儿的行为理解进行回顾和大型分析。


经验与知识之间的关系是心理学中最古老、最深刻的问题之一。在发育科学中，对这个问题的研究主要集中在对尚不能通过伸手和抓握来取回物体的婴儿进行预先教育。在过去的 20 年里，针对这一人群的行为研究产生了两个看似矛盾的发现：在通过“粘性手套”训练进行第一人称接触体验之后，（a）婴儿开始期望人们能够有效地到达目标物体，但是（ b) 在某些情况下，他们无需培训即可表达这些期望。我们假设，婴儿对其他人行为的理解是由用于测试他们能力的任务的代表性要求驱动的，而不是由第一人称运动经验本身驱动的。我们对过去工作的原始数据进行了定性审查和定量、预先注册的“大型分析”（即对 N = 650 名婴儿、30 种情况和 8 篇文章的观察反应进行分析）。我们发现，在控制婴儿年龄的情况下，对婴儿对其他人目标和身体限制的理解影响最强的操作（通过效应大小和贝叶斯因子来衡量）是行动的抽象特征：该行动是否在婴儿时期产生了可观察到的效果。接触世界并为行动者的目标提供了明确的证据。最后，我们提出了一个关于小婴儿如何了解他人的思想和行为的广泛假设，该假设以早期的行动计划直觉理论为中心，并在未来的工作中进行测试。 （PsycInfo 数据库记录 (c) 2023 APA，保留所有权利）。