The overall goal of this target article is to demonstrate a mechanism for an embodied cognition. The particular vehicle is a much-studied, but still widely debated phenomenon seen in 7–12 month-old-infants. In Piaget's classic “A-not-B error,” infants who have successfully uncovered a toy at location “A” continue to reach to that location even after they watch the toy hidden in a nearby location “B.” Here, we question the traditional explanations of the error as an indicator of infants' concepts of objects or other static mental structures. Instead, we demonstrate that the A-not-B error and its previously puzzling contextual variations can be understood by the coupled dynamics of the ordinary processes of goal-directed actions: looking, planning, reaching, and remembering. We offer a formal dynamic theory and model based on cognitive embodiment that both simulates the known A-not-B effects and offers novel predictions that match new experimental results. The demonstration supports an embodied view by casting the mental events involved in perception, planning, deciding, and remembering in the same analogic dynamic language as that used to describe bodily movement, so that they may be continuously meshed. We maintain that this mesh is a pre-eminently cognitive act of “knowing” not only in infancy but also in everyday activities throughout the life span.

Development is about creating something more from something less, for example, a walking and talking toddler from a helpless infant. One current theoretical framework views the developmental process as a change within a complex dynamic system. Development is seen as the emergent product of many decentralized and local interactions that occur in real time. We examine how studying the multicausality of real-time processes could be the key to understanding change over developmental time. We specifically consider recent research and theory on perseverative reaching by infants as a case study that demonstrates this approach.Contemporary developmental psychologists are still asking the same question that has intrigued philosophers and scientists since ancient times. How does the human mind, with all its power and imagination, emerge from the human infant, a creature so unformed and helpless? Some see the transformation as so remarkable that they endow infants with genetically programmed and pre-existing mental structures trapped in an immature body: latent capabilities for language, number, and physical and social reasoning that await revelation as infants mature. We also see the transformation as remarkable, but suggest that development is better understood as the emergent product of many decentralized and local interactions that occur in real time. That is, the developmental process is viewed as change within a complex dynamic system. There are several good introductions available to the concepts and mathematics of dynamic systems theory for cognitive scientists [1,2]. Development as a dynamic systemThe idea of emergence -the coming into existence of new forms through ongoing processes intrinsic to the systemare not new to developmental psychology. Developmental theorists such as Kuo, Oyama and Gottlieb have long emphasized the probabilistic, epigenetic nature of ontogenetic processes. Biologists and psychologists such as Waddington, von Bertalanffy, Lewin and Gesell have envisioned behaviour and development as morphogenetic fields that unify multiple, underlying components. But only in the past decade or so have the concepts and models of non-linear dynamic systems made in-roads into traditional developmental psychology, becoming a contender for a new developmental theory [3 -9] and fundamentally changing the way development is studied (see Box 1).Developmental psychologists have used dynamic systems ideas both as a conceptual theory [3,7,9] and in various formal mathematical treatments of developmental change. These include connectionist models [10], catastrophe theories of structural change from a neo-Piagetian perspective [11] and models based on prey -predator relationships in which skills are envisioned as arising from recursive interacting 'growers' [6,12]. Moreover, dynamic views of development have encompassed many different content domains, including mother-infant relationships, imitation, language, social relationships, perception and action, and atypical patterns of developmental change [13 -18].What u...

The study of the acquisition of motor skills, long moribund in developmental psychology, has seen a renaissance in the last decade. Inspired by contemporary work in movement science, perceptual psychology, neuroscience, and dynamic systems theory, multidisciplinary approaches are affording new insights into the processes by which infants and children learn to control their bodies. In particular, the new synthesis emphasizes the multicausal, fluid, contextual, and self-organizing nature of developmental change, the unity of perception, action, and cognition, and the role of exploration and selection in the emergence of new behavior. Studies are concerned less with how children perform and more with how the components cooperate to produce stability or engender change. Such process approaches make moot the traditional nature-nurture debates.

Dynamical Systems Theorycharacterize the asymptotic behavior, as t → ±∞ of every solution, or, of almost every solution, or, of almost every solution of almost every f , or, • • • ω-limit set of solution x(t): {y : y = lim m→∞ x(t m ), t m → ∞} Goal Reached for n = 1, 2; Little known for n ≥ 3. Restrict to special systems: Hamiltonian, Gradient,etc. H.L. Smith (ASU) Dynamical Systems in Biology ASU, July 5, 2012 3 / 31Dynamical Systems Theorycharacterize the asymptotic behavior, as t → ±∞ of every solution, or, of almost every solution, or, of almost every solution of almost every f , or, • • • ω-limit set of solution x(t): {y : y = lim m→∞ x(t m ), t m → ∞} Goal Reached for n = 1, 2; Little known for n ≥ 3. Restrict to special systems: Hamiltonian, Gradient,etc.

When prelocomotor infants are supported on a motorized treadmill, they perform well-coordinated, alternating stepping movements that are kinematically similar to upright bipedal locomotion. This behavior appeared to be a component of independent walking that could not be recognized without the facilitating context of the treadmill. To understand the ontogenetic origins of treadmill stepping and its relation to later locomotion, we conducted a longitudinal study using an experimental strategy explicitly derived from dynamic systems theory. Dynamic systems theory postulates that new forms in behavior emerge from the cooperative interactions of multiple components within a task context. This approach focuses on the transitions, often nonlinear, where one preferred mode of behavior is replaced by a new form. Specific predictions about these transitions help uncover the processes by which development proceeds. Chapters II, III, and IV introduce dynamic principles of pattern formation and their application to development. In our application of these principles, we tested nine normal infants twice each month beginning from month 1 in a task where the treadmill speed was gradually scaled up and in an additional condition where each leg was driven by the treadmill at a different speed. Kinematic variables were derived from computerized movement analysis equipment and videotaped records. We also collected a number of anthropometric measurements, Bayley motor scores, and a behavioral mood scale for each month. Several infants stepped on the treadmill in their first month, but in all infants performance showed a rapidly rising slope from month 3 to month 6. Infants also showed corresponding improvement in adjustments to speed and relative coordination between the legs. In dynamic terminology, we found evidence that alternating stepping on the treadmill became an increasingly stable attractor during the middle months of the first year. Dynamic predictions that transitions would be characterized by increased variability and sensitivity to perturbation were borne out. Identifying the transitions enabled us to suggest a control parameter or variable moving the system into the stable response to the treadmill. This appeared to be the waning of flexor dominance in the legs during posture and movement that allowed the leg to be stretched back on the treadmill and so elicited the bilaterally alternating response. Further studies are needed to test this hypothesis. This dynamic analysis confirmed earlier suggestions that skill in general, and locomotion in particular, develops from the confluence of many participating elements and showed how emergent forms may result from changes in nonspecific components. A dynamic approach may be useful for understanding ontogenetic processes in other domains as well.

The A-not-B error is one of the most robust and highly studied phenomena in developmental psychology. The traditional Piagetian interpretation is that the error reflects the immaturity of infants' understanding of objects as permanent entities. More recently, the error has been interpreted in terms of changes in representation, in memory, in spatial knowledge, and in inhibitory processes. Each account may be partially right but none offers a unified account of the many accumulated facts about this error. This article presents and tests a new unified explanation. The authors propose that the perseverative reach back to A is the product of the processes that take a hand to a location in visual space: the body-centered nature of the spatial code, memories for previous reaching activity, and the close coupling of looking and reaching. The results from 6 experiments support this explanation. The results are used to challenge the idea of knowledge independent of and distinct from behavior.

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chology needs to advance from explaining psychological phenomena in specific controlled settings toward deriving underlying Auto no us en al computational principles of mental devel--