Abstract
Infants’ minutes long babbling bouts or repetitive reaching for or mouthing of whatever they can get their hands on gives very much the impression of active exploration, a building block for early learning. But how can we tell apart active exploration from the activity of an immature motor system, attempting but failing to achieve goal directed behavior? I will focus here on evidence that infants increase motor activity and variability when faced with opportunities to gather new information (about their own bodies or the world) and propose this as a guiding principle for separating variability generated for exploration from noise. I will discuss mechanisms generating movement variability, and suggests that, in the various forms it takes, from deliberate hypothesis testing to increasing environmental variability, it could be exploited for learning. However, understanding how variability in motor acts contributes to early learning will require more in-depth investigations of both the nature of and the contextual modulation of this variability.
Highlights
INTRODUCTIONInteract with objects or attempting to communicate, one cannot but observe the great variability of their motor acts
Watching infants move about, interact with objects or attempting to communicate, one cannot but observe the great variability of their motor acts
In the adult skill acquisition literature, as well, movement variability is an index of error or noise in sensory-motor systems, something the organism strives to eliminate as a new skill is acquired (Harris and Wolpert, 1998; Todorov and Jordan, 2002)
Summary
Interact with objects or attempting to communicate, one cannot but observe the great variability of their motor acts. While suggesting that “The active obtaining of information that results from the spontaneous actions of the infant is a kind of learning,” she raised the question of whether “this activity is in any way controlled by the infant,” rather than “compulsory response to stimulation (Gibson, 1988).” This is further complicated by the fact that variability in motor behavior has often been described as the manifestation of an immature system, which is attempting but failing to achieve goal directed behavior (e.g., Yan et al, 2000). Given the aim of this review is to illustrate a general principle, evidence will be brought from a variety of motor acts: reaching, locomotion or vocal behavior, and from a variety of species Both variability that supports exploration of an organism’s motor abilities and of the surrounding environment will be considered. I will ask the question of which of these mechanisms might be at play in early human development
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