When a Toddler Starts Handling Multiple Detached Objects: Descriptions of a Toddler's Niche Through Everyday Actions

Abstract

Using the Akachan Movie Database (Sasaki et al., 2006), a movie database of infants' niches, this article considers the issue of what is around the development of action in early childhood and its implications on behavioral flexibility and nesting of actions. A toddler's activity of repeatedly gathering toy blocks into a container, observed over the period of 10 months at home, was extracted from the database for the analysis. In the activity, 42 toy blocks, their container, and its lid—“detached objects” according to J. J. Gibson's (1979/1986) term—were around the toddler, giving a variety of meanings to the toddler's actions. Longitudinal study of the setting found that there was a range of postures employed in the activity, and the change of postures across the periods reflected the meaning of the layout of surfaces surrounding the activity. Along with the change of postural variations, the emergence of novel action coordination was observed in which an invariant spatial relationship between the detached objects and the toddler was maintained in such a way to facilitate the act. The close relation found between the meaning of the environment and behavioral flexibility and nesting of actions in the activity supports the proposition that such properties of action are the symptoms of functional coupling to the ecological resources available in a situation.