ABSTRACT

Much of our everyday actions consist of several action steps, which are hierarchically structured. Yet, little is known about the development of the prediction of such complex actions in early childhood. The current work investigated the development of predicting means-end actions in 3- to 6-year-olds (N = 86) and an adult control group (N = 25). Participants were asked to predict the upcoming action of an actor who either needed an object (means) to achieve her goal (complex condition) or could directly achieve her goal (simple condition). Overall, children performed above chance in predicting the upcoming action of complex actions. Furthermore, simple action prediction and complex action prediction increased with age. However, overall, their performance was significantly worse for predicting complex compared to simple actions. Adults on the other hand showed ceiling performance in both conditions. Taken together, the results show that children’s prediction performance of complex actions increases during early childhood. These findings expand previous research on complex action understanding to the prediction of complex actions and show substantial development during the preschool years.

摘要

我们的许多日常活动都由几个行动步骤组成，这些行动步骤是按层次结构进行组织的。然而，关于这种复杂动作在儿童早期的预测发展知之甚少。当前的工作调查了在3至6岁（N = 86）和成人对照组（N = 25）中预测均数末端作用的发展。要求参与者预测需要一个对象（手段）以实现其目标（复杂条件）或可以直接实现她的目标（简单条件）的演员的即将采取的行动。总体而言，儿童在预测复杂动作即将到来的动作时表现出了较高的机会。此外，简单动作预测和复杂动作预测随着年龄增长而增加。但是，总的来说，与简单动作相比，它们在预测复杂动作方面的性能明显较差。另一方面，成年人在两种情况下均表现出天花板性能。两者合计，结果表明，儿童对复杂动作的预测表现在幼儿期就增加了。这些发现将先前对复杂动作理解的研究扩展到了对复杂动作的预测，并显示了学龄前的实质性发展。