Reading focus
Syllabus: How Do Infants Build Knowledge and Skills?
Make the transfer question concrete through sitting and crawling. Compare a general claim about perceiving danger with an account of calibration to a particular body and action.
A question to consider. Why would successful avoidance in one posture be insufficient to predict behavior in another, and how do the individual gap thresholds make that comparison more informative?
Why this reading
What transfers when an infant acquires a new way of moving? Adolph compares responses to gaps in different postures. The study turns an apparent failure to avoid danger into a question about learning the relation between a body, a skill, and an environment.
Before you read
An affordance is an opportunity for action relative to a body and its capabilities. Transfer means that experience in one situation supports performance in another. A psychophysical staircase varies task difficulty to estimate a boundary—in this case, a gap that an individual infant can span in a particular posture.
Read for
- Explain why gap size is evaluated relative to each infant’s capability in each posture rather than treated as the same risk for everyone.
- Compare the sitting and crawling conditions, including the second experiment’s changes to support. What alternative explanations do those comparisons address?
- Distinguish experience with an action, experience falling, and learning within the test session. Which observations support the proposed account?
Consider afterwards
- An infant avoids a difficult gap while sitting but attempts it while crawling. What would you measure before attributing this difference to a general understanding of danger?
Editorial context
The study supports specificity in the calibration of perception and action. It does not imply that infants fail to perceive depth or that no learning can generalize. Experience with postures was not randomly assigned; the experimental contrasts and experience correlations answer different questions. Adolph, Berger, and Leo’s later study extends the transfer question across crawling, cruising, and walking.