Non-obvious influences on perception-action abilities

Abstract

The sciences of development and learning have been slow to acknowledge that absence of an identifiable experience that relates straightforwardly to a given perceptionaction ability need not mean that experience per se is irrelevant to the emergence of that ability. A recent study reveals that a difference in diet (plain vs. energy rich) leads to a difference in how rats navigate (use of geometry vs. use of features, respectively). It is a good example of how a seemingly unrelated experience (e.g., what the rats eat) can be a non-obvious yet crucial determiner of perception-action modes. We situate this finding in the broader context of the related conceptions of Schneirla's and Lehrman's Developmental Systems Theory, Gottlieb's Probabilistic Epigenesis, and Bolles's Structure of Learning (see article for references). In doing so we highlight that such phenomena may be the norm, both in development and learning, rather than the exception.

Mother-Infant Interaction in the Emergence of a Tool-Using Skill at Mealtime: A Process of Affordance Selection

“…The spatial context is often crowded with multiple opportunities of action available on the tabletop. Our study adds to the growing realization that normally occurring experiences of rich affordances matter in the development of specific behavior in a given population (Bril et al, 2001;Gottlieb, 1997Gottlieb, /2014Nonaka, Bril, & Rein, 2010;Nonaka, 2012Nonaka, , 2017Reed, 1996;Turvey & Sheya, 2017). Spontaneous exploration by infants in the sea of affordances, when coupled with the selection of a set of opportunities by adults, may provide a directional effect that enables infants to attend to the relevant set of affordances of utensils, which in turn develops their skills to realize them in a manner appropriate to a specific context in the populated environment.…”

Social interaction in the emergence of toddler’s mealtime spoon use

“…In addition, we cannot generalize from the mealtime use of utensils to broader developmental processes, or even to learning about other tools. It is important to point out, however, that many phenomena of skill acquisition have non‐obvious causal relations to their typical surroundings (Gottlieb, 1998; Turvey & Sheya, 2017), including typical cultural surroundings (Gibson, 1950; Mauss, 1973; Veissiere et al., 2019), which are so commonplace that they can only be discovered through the careful observation of a natural environment where such development literally takes place . The current study has described the normally occurring reciprocal coupling between the actions of caregiver and novice spoon feeders that surround the emerging skill that, we hope, may serve as hypotheses to test in a more rigorous experimental setting in the future.…”

Modeling infants’ perceptual narrowing to musical rhythms: neural oscillation and Hebbian plasticity

“…Ontogeny is a complex, emergent process that arises from interactions between the developing organism and the structures present in the rearing environment . In the field of infant and child development, one of the most robust consequences of organism−environment interactions is the adaption and reorganization of perception−action systems to structural regularities in the environment.…”

“…Ontogeny is a complex, emergent process that arises from interactions between the developing organism and the structures present in the rearing environment. [1][2][3][4][5] In the field of infant and child development, one of the most robust consequences of organism−environment interactions is the adaption and reorganization of perception−action systems to structural regularities in the environment. Perceptual adaption that occurs over developmental timescales (e.g., months and years) has been called "perceptual narrowing" or "perceptual finetuning," and suggests that perception−action systems transition from a more general state, during nascent periods of ontogeny, to a more specialized state, as a consequence of experience-expectant and -dependent processes.…”