Cue salience and infant perseverative reaching: tests of the dynamic field theory

Abstract

Skilled behavior requires a balance between previously successful behaviors and new behaviors appropriate to the present context. We describe a dynamic field model for understanding this balance in infant perseverative reaching. The model predictions are tested with regard to the interaction of two aspects of the typical perseverative reaching task: the visual cue indicating the target and the memory demand created by the delay imposed between cueing and reaching. The memory demand was manipulated by imposing either a 0-or a 3-second delay, and the salience of the cue to reach was systematically varied. Infants demonstrated fewer perseverative errors at 0-delay versus 3-second delay based on the cue salience, such that a more salient visual cue was necessary to overcome a longer delay. These results have important implications for understanding both the basic perceptualmotor processes that produce reaching in infants and skilled flexible behavior in general.

The role of perceptual similarity of the task environments in children’s perseverative responding

“…Furthermore, there is nothing in a response-level account that links the strength of the motor response to the degree of perceptual similarity between hiding arrays. In fact, one theoretical perspective that could potentially explain such findings is the dynamic systems account (e.g., Clearfield, Diedrich, Smith, & Thelen, 2006;Clearfield, Dineva, Smith, Diedrich, & Thelen, 2009;Diedrich, Thelen, Smith, & Corbetta, 2000), which argues that factors such as motor history and perceptual information can and do drive infant search. Unfortunately, the applicability of this perspective to the current situation is problematic in that this account has been offered to explain search behavior principally in two object (i.e., A-not-B) tasks and has not been extended to either multiple object or symbolic search tasks.…”

Comment on “Infants’ Perseverative Search Errors Are Induced by Pragmatic Misinterpretation”

“…As such, this account cannot explain performance across the wide variety of versions of this task that parametrically manipulate task factors and impact these basic cognitive processes9–11.…”

“…We took parameters and simulation details from the dynamic field model used by Clearfield et al9 that predicted cue-salience effects, implemented the Topál et al procedure, and then varied the strength of the cuing input across conditions (from a value of 4 with the ostensive cues present to a value of 7 in the non-communicative condition and 8 in the non-social condition; see Figure 1). Our hypothesis: infants encode the location of the hiding event relatively weakly when richly structured social cues are present .…”

Self-trained perception need not be veridical: striking can exaggerate judgment by wielding and can transfer exaggeration to new stimuli

“…The present results indicate that self-organization need not generate veridical responses. Self-organization may be an important framework in which to consider learning in general (Kelty- Stephen & Dixon, 2014;Spencer, Thomas, & McClelland, 2009;Thelen & Smith, 1994), but we should not forget that some of the most pioneering and programmatic work in applying self-organization to psychology dealt with a perceptual discrepancy, namely, the Piagetian A-not-B error in which the developing infant's mind systematically misaligns haptic coordination of infant reaching with visual information about target location, leading to a systematically non-zero discrepancy between reach and target (e.g., Clearfield, Dineva, Smith, Diedrich, & Thelen, 2009;Spencer, Dineva, & Smith, 2009;Spencer, Perone, & Buss, 2011). Individual participants' perceptual-discrepancy data in Interleaved group (black) compared to predicted perceptual discrepancy according to Model 2 (shown in Table 3; grey) for all judgments that they produced.…”