Infants as young as 5 months of age view familiar actions such as reaching as goal-directed (Woodward, 1998), but how do they construe the goal of an actor's reach? Six experiments investigated whether 12-month-old infants represent reaching actions as directed to a particular individual object, to a narrowly defined object category (e.g., an orange dump truck), or to a more broadly defined object category (e.g., any truck, vehicle, artifact, or inanimate object). The experiments provide evidence that infants are predisposed to represent reaching actions as directed to categories of objects at least as broad as the basic level, both when the objects represent artifacts (trucks) and when they represent people (dolls). Infants do not use either narrower category information or spatiotemporal information to specify goal objects. Because spatiotemporal information is central to infants' representations of inanimate object motions and interactions, the findings are discussed in relation to the development of object knowledge and action representations.

中文翻译：

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任何娃娃都会做吗？12 个月大的孩子对目标对象的推理

5 个月大的婴儿会看到熟悉的行为，例如达到目标（Woodward，1998），但他们如何解释演员达到的目标？六项实验调查了 12 个月大的婴儿是否表现出针对特定个体物体、狭义定义的物体类别（例如，橙色自卸车）或更广泛定义的物体类别（例如，任何卡车、车辆、人工制品或无生命物体）。实验提供的证据表明，当对象代表人工制品（卡车）和代表人（玩偶）时，婴儿倾向于表现出针对至少与基本级别一样广泛的对象类别的伸手动作。婴儿不使用较窄的类别信息或时空信息来指定目标对象。