"Infant Learning Through Active Exploration"

Abstract:
Over the past 40 years, many important discoveries have been made about how infants experience the world. These discoveries have been very important to our understanding of infancy, but a full understanding of development involves more than documenting what infants know and when they know it. We must also strive to explain how infants move from one level of functioning to another. In this talk I will describe research we have done to find out what changes in infants' behavioral and cognitive repertoires as they make the transition to independent reaching. One way to look at these results is that when infants begin their own actions on the physical world, a developmental cascade is started that allows other learning to take place.