Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

The Impact Of Repeated Sensory-Motor Experience With Multimodal Objects Upon The Emergence Of Infant Reaching, Joshua L Williams

Doctoral Dissertations

Previous studies found that providing infants with repeated opportunities for reaching improved the emergence and quality of the behavior, presumably via exploratory and selective processes (Bojczyk & Corbetta, 2004; Lobo et al., 2008). Here we further examined the effects of opportunities for reaching by exposing infants to multimodal objects that were activated either continuously by a hidden motor or contingently by hand-toy contact. We asked if such objects would motivate infants to try to reach for them even more than still and silent objects.

Forty-four pre-reaching infants were recruited within the week prior to turning three months of age and …