How Do Infants Learn About the Physical World? 论文

摘要

Until recently, young infants were assumed to lack even the most fundamental of adults' beliefs about objects. This conclusion was based largely on analyses of young infants' performance in object manipulation tasks. For example, young infants were said to be unaware that an ob ject continues to exist when masked by another object because they con sistently failed tasks that required them to search for an object hidden beneath or behind another object.1 In time, however, researchers came to realize that young infants might fail tasks such as search tasks not because of limited physical knowledge, but because of difficul ties associated with the planning and execution of action sequences. This concern led investigators to seek al ternative methods for exploring young infants' physical knowledge, methods that did not depend on the manipulation of objects. Infants' well-documented ten