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Development of prospective control as the basis of action development
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DEVELOPMENT OF PROSPECTIVE CONTROL AS THE BASIS OF ACTION DEVELOPMENT Claes von Hofsten Department of Psychology, Umea University, S-90187 Umea, SWEDEN All actions are geared to the future and controlling them requires knowledge of upcoming events. We continuously need to know what is going to happen, both within the near and the far future, in order to plan our activities and to coordinate our movements. This is of great importance when considering action development. Infants come into this world prepared for action but need to develop their predictive abilities in order to coordinate their movements, plan their activities, and attain their goals. It is true that the movements of neonates are incompletely organized and subject to a number of bodily and neural constraints but they cannot primarily be characterized as reflexes. Rather they are functionally adequate, goal directed, and driven by motives. The motives are an important part of the biological preparation for acquiring action skills. Infants stubbornly persist in their attempts to perform actions which they obviously have not yet mastered. The motives insure that the early activity of infants eventually becomes organized as action systems. From the beginning of life, infants are deeply engaged in exploring the external world and their ability to act in it. By moving and acting on the world, infants will develop prospective control of their actions. Through their activities they will learn about the rules that govern their own movements and about the regularities or invariances that govern events in the world. It will enable them to plan their movements in an adequate way, coordinate their different body parts, and coordinate their actions with external events. These points will be discussed and related to research findings in the area of gaze control and reaching. In the area of gaze control, I will discuss how infants, during the first few months of life, acquire an ability to stabilize gaze by compensating for their own body movements and predictively tracking a moving target. In the area of reaching, I will discuss how the rudimentary neonatal reaching is transformed into functional reaching and grasping patterns that enable infants to catch even fast moving objects.
DEVELOPMENT OF PROSPECTIVE CONTROL AS THE BASIS OF ACTION DEVELOPMENT Claes von Hofsten Department of Psychology, Umea University, S-90187 Umea, SWEDEN All actions are geared to the future and controlling them requires knowledge of upcoming events. We continuously need to know what is going to happen, both within the near and the far future, in order to plan our activities and to coordinate our movements. This is of great importance when considering action development. Infants come into this world prepared for action but need to develop their predictive abilities in order to coordinate their movements, plan their activities, and attain their goals. It is true that the movements of neonates are incompletely organized and subject to a number of bodily and neural constraints but they cannot primarily be characterized as reflexes. Rather they are functionally adequate, goal directed, and driven by motives. The motives are an important part of the biological preparation for acquiring action skills. Infants stubbornly persist in their attempts to perform actions which they obviously have not yet mastered. The motives insure that the early activity of infants eventually becomes organized as action systems. From the beginning of life, infants are deeply engaged in exploring the external world and their ability to act in it. By moving and acting on the world, infants will develop prospective control of their actions. Through their activities they will learn about the rules that govern their own movements and about the regularities or invariances that govern events in the world. It will enable them to plan their movements in an adequate way, coordinate their different body parts, and coordinate their actions with external events. These points will be discussed and related to research findings in the area of gaze control and reaching. In the area of gaze control, I will discuss how infants, during the first few months of life, acquire an ability to stabilize gaze by compensating for their own body movements and predictively tracking a moving target. In the area of reaching, I will discuss how the rudimentary neonatal reaching is transformed into functional reaching and grasping patterns that enable infants to catch even fast moving objects.