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Talk Information
📌 Title: Divisive inhibition as a solution to the correspondence problem in perceptual organization
📌 Speaker: Prof. Chien-Chung Chen (Department of Psychology, National Taiwan University)
📌 Time: 2025/11/14 (Fri.) 13:10–15:00
📌 Venue: Lecture Hall, Department of Psychology, 2F, North Building, College of Social Sciences, NCKU
📌 Language: Chinese
📌 General Education certified lecture: No
📌 Online meeting link: [Please click here to register] 👉 After completing registration, you will receive the online meeting link.

Abstract:
The purpose of this talk is to elucidate the roles of rationality, intentionality, and action experience in infants’ early understanding of actions as goal-directed. I will introduce three recent studies that my students and I have completed. In the first study, we used a habituation procedure to investigate the extent to which infants use the efficiency of actions to rationally attribute a goal to an inanimate object, and continue to track the goal of the inanimate object in a changed context. The second study examined whether the well-known imitation pattern—in which infants privilege copying of goals over copying of the actions by which the goals are achieved—is better explained by experience with the actions or by the physical efficiency of the actions. In the third study, we investigated infants' imitation and generalization of an arbitrary act to achieve an effect (using the head to activate a light box) across different contexts and objects. Specifically, we examined whether infants’ imitation of a novel manner relies on the model’s intention to communicate about learning the manner, and whether pedagogical interactions impact their generalization of this novel manner to objects of the same kind.