The Embodied Origins of Infant Reaching: Implications for the Emergence of Eye-Hand Coordination

Abstract

This article reviews the literature on infant reaching, from past to present, to recount how our understanding of the emergence and development of this early goal-directed behavior has changed over the decades. We show that the still widely-accepted view, which considers the emergence and development of infant reaching as occurring primarily under the control of vision, is no longer sustainable. Increasing evidence suggests that the developmental origins of infant reaching is embodied. We discuss the implications of this alternative view for the development of eye-hand coordination and we propose a new scenario stressing the importance of the infant body-centered sensorimotor experiences in the months prior to the emergence of reaching as a possible critical step for the formation of eye-hand coordination.

Parents Influence the Visual Learning Environment Through Children's Manual Actions

“…This is consistent with work from Corbetta et al. () revealing the importance of holding leading to rich visual input.…”

“…Manual engagement with objects helps children discover the rich physical features of objects, including size, texture, and shape. Through exploration of these features, children learn to refine their actions and develop a sense of agency in dealing with their physical and social surroundings (Corbetta, Wiener, Thurman, & McMahon, ). Manual engagement also largely contributes to a child's first‐person view of objects (Smith et al., ), which predicts object name learning during social play (Pereira et al., ).…”

Integration of haptics and vision in human multisensory grasping

“…Importantly, their inability to produce successful grasps is not due to an immature motor system (Wallace & Whishaw, 2003), to low visual acuity (Banks & Salapatek, 1978) or to undeveloped stereovision (Braddick et al, 1980; Held, Birch, & Gwiazda, 1980), but rather to an unformed mapping between visual inputs and motor plans. This visuomotor mapping is thought to be achieved through an embodied process that requires infants to rely on proprioceptive and, more generally, haptic inputs from their reaching hand (Corbetta, Thurman, Wiener, Guan, & Williams, 2014; Corbetta, Wiener, Thurman, & McMahon, 2018; Thomas, Karl, & Whishaw, 2015). Our findings suggest that valuable haptic spatial cues provided by the hand holding the object could also assist the visuomotor learning process by promoting the development of precise visually controlled reach and grasp movements.…”

Development of Infant Reaching Strategies to Tactile Targets on the Face

“…By 18–20 weeks all infants studied by Provine and Westerman (1979) made contralateral reaches. Studies have also shown that reaching to an object in external space becomes faster, more efficient, and more direct during the first year (Thelen et al, 1993; Berthier and Keen, 2006; Rönnqvist and Domellöf, 2006; D’Souza et al, 2017; Corbetta et al, 2018). Furthermore, reaching is not limited to stimuli that are perceived visually.…”