Understanding the actions of others depends on the insight that these actions are structured by intentional relations. In a number of conceptual domains, comparison with familiar instances has been shown to support children's and adults' ability to discern the relational structure of novel instances. Recent evidence suggests that this process supports infants' analysis of others' goal-directed actions (Gerson & Woodward, 2012). The current studies evaluated whether labeling, which has been shown to support relational learning in other domains, also supports infants' sensitivity to the goal structure of others' actions. Ten-month-old infants observed events in which a familiar action, grasping, was aligned (simultaneously presented) with a novel tool-use action, and both actions were accompanied by a matched label. Following this training, infants responded systematically to the goal structure of the tool-use actions in a goal imitation paradigm. In control conditions, when the aligned actions were accompanied by nonword vocalizations, or when labeling occurred without aligned actions, infants did not respond systematically to the tool-use action. These findings indicate that labels supported infants' comparison of the aligned actions, and this comparison facilitated their understanding of the novel action as goal-directed.

中文翻译：

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标签有助于婴儿比较行动目标


理解他人的行为取决于对这些行为是由有意关系构成的洞察力。在许多概念领域，与熟悉的实例进行比较已被证明可以支持儿童和成人辨别新实例的关系结构的能力。最近的证据表明，这一过程支持婴儿对他人目标导向行为的分析（Gerson & Woodward，2012）。目前的研究评估了标签是否已被证明支持其他领域的关系学习，也支持婴儿对其他人行为的目标结构的敏感性。十个月大的婴儿观察到的事件中，熟悉的抓握动作与新的工具使用动作对齐（同时呈现），并且这两种动作都附有匹配的标签。经过这次训练，婴儿在目标模仿范式中系统地对工具使用行为的目标结构做出反应。在控制条件下，当一致的动作伴随着非单词发声时，或者当在没有一致的动作的情况下进行标记时，婴儿不会对工具使用动作做出系统的反应。这些发现表明，标签支持婴儿对一致的行为进行比较，这种比较有助于他们将新的行为理解为目标导向的。