Exploration and Selection in the Early Acquisition of Skill

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Development of Brain and Behavior

The lives of babies seem far removed from the concerns of neuroscientists. In a world measured in microseconds, microliters, micrometers, and microvolts, the endearing but clumsy and whimsical noodlings of infants bear little relevance. What we hope to show in this article, however, is that the behavior of human infants during their first years of life can both inform, and be informed by, contemporary advances in the brain sciences, as reported in many of the other papers in this volume. To do

Dynamic Systems Approach to Development

If not simply brain maturity, how then to conceptualize learning to walk and the acquisition of other skills, in light of the multiple interactions and the shifting and context-dependent nature of performance? Fortunately, about the time of work on the disappearing reflex, there was a growing interest in the works of the movement physiologist Bernstein (1967). Bernstein's insights had profound implications for understanding brain-behavior relations in the control of movement, and for its

Behavioral Dynamics of Learning to Reach

The question of the neural control of the trajectory of arm and hand for reaching is one that is currently generating much interest and controversy among cognitive scientists, neuroscientists, bioengineers, and computer modelers. The debate is unresolved: some claim that the central nervous system (CNS) plans reaches to be smooth and graceful by minimizing irregularities in the path of the hand (Hogan, 1984). Others see the CNS exerting control on the direction of the hand path (Morasso, 1981).

Infant Reaching and Neural Dynamics

The lesson from infant reaching is that this new behavior cannot have arisen from a dedicated reaching “device” in the brain, innate or prefigured, and awaiting autonomous, time-dependent processes of “maturation” for its liberation. Following Edelman (1987) and consistent with a dynamic, Bernstein-inspired approach, we suggest that infants begin life with a few simple biases, for example, to look at interesting visual events and to have interesting things in their mouths. They also arrive in

Acknowledgments

This work was supported by the National Institutes of Health, Grant RO1 HD22830, and by a Research Career Development Award (K02 MH00718) from the National Institute of Mental Health to Esther Thelen.

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      Whether or not the infants’ goal was to “pick up” the toy or simply to touch it and reach for it, we cannot say. But, to think that infants require demonstration of the “sticky” mittens to discover the functionality of the mittens is contrary to everything Gibson (1988, 2000) – which Needham et al. cite extensively – and others (Adolph & Robinson, 2015; Thelen, 1995; Thelen & Smith, 1994) have said about the role of motor exploration on motor development and selection (see also Thelen & Corbetta, 1994, on this issue). Gibson particularly, stresses, among other things, the importance self-guided exploration, the importance of touch and direct sensory information for the discovery, selections, and differentiation of motor solutions (Gibson, 1988, 2000; Gibson & Pick, 2000; Pick, 1992).

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