Eye-hand coordination in the newborn (original) (raw)

Dynamic reaching in infants during binocular and monocular viewing

Experimental Brain Research, 2013

this study examined reaching in 6-, 8-, and 10-month-olds during binocular and monocular viewing in a dynamic reaching situation. Infants were rotated toward a flat vertical board and reached for objects at one of seven positions along a horizontal line at shoulder height. hand selection, time to contact the object, and reaching accuracy were examined in both viewing conditions. hand selection was strongly dependent on object location, not on infants' age or whether one eye was covered. Monocular viewing and age did, however, affect time to object contact and contact errors: Infants showed longer contact times when one eye was covered, and 6-month-olds made more contact errors in the monocular condition. For right-hand selection, contact times were longer when the covered right eye was leading during the chair rotation. For left-hand selection, there were no differences in contact time due to whether the covered eye was leading during rotation.

A Natural Physical Perspective on the Development of Infant Eye-Hand Coordination:A Search for the Laws of Control

乳幼児発達臨床センター年報 Research and Clinical Center For Child Development Annual Report, 1994

The goal of the article is to describe a research paradigm with respect to eyehand coordination. Basic concepts of ecological psychology (information and affordances), of non-linear dynamics (order parameter, control parameter and stabil• ity), and of the natural physical approach (the laws of control) are discussed. The article will conclude with a description of the research program as currently conducted within the proposed research paradigm.

Infant Cortical Development and the Prospective Control of Saccadic Eye Movements

Infancy, 2001

Babies, like everyone else in this world, need to learn how to coordinate their actions with events that are not under their direct control. Response latency is an obstacle in this process, and the primary goal of sensorimotor development is to overcome it through the application of foresight (Piaget, 1937/1954). Visual exploration is where the infant first seriously confronts the problem of response latency. The infant moves his or her eye to inspect something in the periphery, only to find that when his or her eye has rotated to its final position, the object of interest may no longer be there. To solve this problem, he or she must learn to make good guesses about the future and be ready to act when, or even before, the future arrives. In other words, the baby will need to organize his or her behavior in a prospective manner. Rather than simply reacting to what happens to him or her, the baby needs to start thinking ahead. Eventually, the baby will be guided by plans, goals, anticipatory schemata, expectations, and memories of the future. By developing prospective sensorimotor control, not only will the baby become the master of his or her domain, he or she will be building a foundation

Hand-Eye Coordination and Visual Attention in Infancy

Cognitive Science, 2018

In crowded and cluttered environments, infants can reduce visual clutter by using manual actions to bring objects closer to the eyes, what we refer to as hand-eye coordination. Hand-eye coordination is therefore hypothesized to be an important ability for controlling and distributing attention. Little is known about how the emerging ability to integrate both gaze and manual actions onto objects impacts how attention is distributed. Twenty-five infants participated in a naturalistic toy play session that included 24 toys. Overall, infants generated distributions of attention that were rightskewed, reflecting coherence: a composition of selectivity of a few highly-frequent toys and exploration of many less-frequent toys. We observed that individual differences in hand-eye coordination impacted distributions of attention, with infants displaying low hand-eye coordination having dramatically less coherent distributions of visual attention during bouts of hand-eye coordination. These res...

On the relation between action selection and movement control in 5-to 9-month-old infants

Experimental Brain …, 2011

Although 5-month-old infants select action modes that are adaptive to the size of the object (i.e., oneor two-handed reaching), it has largely remained unclear whether infants of this age control the ensuing movement to the size of the object (i.e., scaling of the aperture between hands). We examined 5-, 7-, and 9-month-olds' reaching behaviors to gain more insight into the developmental changes occurring in the visual guidance of action mode selection and movement control, and the relationship between these processes. Infants were presented with a small set of objects (i.e., 2, 3, 7, and 8 cm) and a large set of objects (i.e., 6, 9, 12, and 15 cm). For the first set of objects, it was found that the infants more often performed two-handed reaches for the larger objects based on visual information alone (i.e., before making contact with the object), thus showing adaptive action mode selection relative to object size. Kinematical analyses of the twohanded reaches for the second set of objects revealed that inter-trial variance in aperture between the hands decreased with the approach toward the object, indicating that infants' reaching is constrained by the object. Subsequent analysis showed that between hand aperture scaled to object size, indicating that visual control of the movement is adjusted to object size in infants as young as 5 months. Individual analyses indicated that the two processes were not dependent and followed distinct developmental trajectories. That is, adaptive selection of an action mode was not a prerequisite for appropriate aperture scaling, and vice versa. These findings are consistent with the idea of two separate and independent visual systems (Milner and Goodale in Neuropsychologia 46:774-785, 2008) during early infancy.

Exploration of the newborn's manual activity: A window onto early cognitive processes

Infant Behavior & Development, 2005

Neuronal group selection theory (NGST) proposals . Biologie de la conscience. Paris: Odile Jacob] focusing on variability are used to aid the understanding of the close relation existing at birth between cognitive endowments and haptic manual functioning. We report a series of experiments providing evidence for a manual activity characterised at birth by its variability: the neonate cyclical manual activity alternating opening and closing of the hand is defined as a general exploratory movement pattern (GEMP) that newborns use as an exploratory tool. This GEMP is sufficiently variable to offer a huge diversity in the object properties explored. This diversity allows, in turn, a cognitive process of comparison allowing neonates to unify their multimodal perception.