The development of new motor skills alters how infants interact with objects and people. Consequently, it has been suggested that motor skills may initiate a cascade of events influencing subsequent development. However, only correlational evidence for this assumption has been obtained thus far. The current study addressed this question experimentally by systematically varying reaching experiences in 40 three-month-old infants who were not reaching on their own yet and examining their object engagement in a longitudinal follow-up assessment 12 months later. Results revealed increased object exploration and attention focusing skills in 15-month-old infants who experienced active reaching at three months of age compared to untrained infants or infants who only passively experienced reaching. Further, grasping activity after – but not before – reaching training predicted infants’ object exploration 12 months later. These findings provide evidence for the long-term effects of reaching experiences and illustrate the cascading effects initiated by early motor skills.

Walkers fall frequently, especially during infancy. Children (15-, 21-, 27-, 33-, and 39-month-olds) and adults were tested in a novel foam pit paradigm to examine age-related changes in the relationship between falling and prospective control of locomotion. In trial 1, participants walked and fell into a deformable foam pit marked with distinct visual cues. Although children in all 5 age groups required multiple trials to learn to avoid falling, the number of children who showed adult-like, 1-trial learning increased with age. Exploration and alternative locomotor strategies increased dramatically on learning criterion trials and displays of negative affect were limited. Learning from falling is discussed in terms of the immediate and long-term effects of falling on prospective control of locomotion.

Can young children visualize the solution to a difficult spatial problem? Forty-eight 3-year-olds were tested in a spatial reasoning paradigm in which they were asked to predict the path of a ball moving through one of three intertwined tubes. One group of children was asked to visualize the ball rolling down the tube before they made their predictions, a second group was given identical instructions without being asked to use visual imagery, and a third group was given no instructions. Children in the visualization condition performed significantly better than those in the other conditions, suggesting that encouraging young children to use visual imagery may help them to reason through difficult problems.The ability to engage in visual imagery-to mentally represent an object or an event that is not physically present-is one of the most powerful operations in human cognition. It is particularly useful for problem-solving because it allows one to try out solutions before committing to a particular course of action. For example, in arranging furniture in a small room, it is helpful to be able to imagine whether a configuration is possible before actually moving things around. Adults' ability to use and benefit from visual imagery is clear and well-documented (e.g., Cooper, 1975;Driskell, Copper, & Moran, 1994;Kosslyn, 1978;Shepard & Metzler, 1971;Vieilledent, Kosslyn, Berthoz, & Giraudo, 2003). Here, we asked whether young children can also benefit from visualizing a solution to a difficult problem.Much of the previous work on imagery in children has focused not on whether they can use it for imagining solutions to problems, but on whether they can use it to mentally rotate objects (e.g., Funk, Brugger, & Wilkening, 2005;Krüger & Krist, 2009; Marmar, 1975) or to map the location of an object in a familiar room to the corresponding location in a novel room (Reiser, Garing, and Young, 1994). One line of research has demonstrated convincingly that children can use imagery to solve a particular kind of logic problem. Harris (1988, 1990) provided 4-to 6-year-olds with counterfactual statements (e.g., "all fishes live in trees"), and asked them to engage in syllogistic reasoning about a specific example ("Tot is a fish. Does Tot live in water?"). Children were more likely to respond correctly ("No. Because you told me that fishes live in trees.") if they were instructed beforehand to pretend that they lived on a different planet or to "make a picture" of the situation in their heads (see also Richards & Sanderson, 1999). Even in these studies, however, the focus was not on children's use of imagery to visualize a solution to a problem, but on their use of imagery to enter a fantasy world where a counterfactual statement could be true.The purpose of the current study was to examine young children's use of visual imagery for problem-solving. We adapted a spatial reasoning paradigm in which preschoolers observe an experimenter drop a ball down one of three tubes and are then asked to search for the ball (Hood, 1...

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Standing and walking generate information about friction underfoot. Five experiments examined whether walkers use such perceptual information for prospective control of locomotion. In particular, do walkers integrate information about friction underfoot with visual cues for sloping ground ahead to make adaptive locomotor decisions? Participants stood on low-, medium-, and high-friction surfaces on a flat platform and made perceptual judgments for possibilities for locomotion over upcoming slopes. Perceptual judgments did not match locomotor abilities: Participants tended to overestimate their abilities on low-friction slopes and underestimate on high-friction slopes (Experiments 1-4). Accuracy improved only for judgments made while participants were in direct contact with the slope (Experiment 5), highlighting the difficulty of incorporating information about friction underfoot into a plan for future actions.