Reading focus
Syllabus: How Do Infants Build Knowledge and Skills?
Introduce a process account of task performance and change. Compare the authors’ explanation of reaching with the assumptions needed to interpret the drawbridge task, without treating one as a direct replication of the other.
A question to consider. Design a change in a reaching task that would discriminate between an account based only on a fixed competence and one sensitive to recent actions and current cues.
Why this reading
A small change in a task can transform an infant’s response. Smith and Thelen use such changes to argue that development emerges from interacting processes operating over different timescales. Their account asks how coordinated behavior is produced, rather than treating a developmental label as its explanation.
Before you read
Self-organization means that a coordinated pattern can emerge from interactions among components without a separate controller specifying every response. Timescales range from movements within a trial to learning across months. In the A-not-B task, an infant may return to a previously rewarded location after seeing the object placed elsewhere.
Read for
- Trace how current cues, previous reaches, memory, and posture contribute to a response in the proposed account.
- Follow one manipulation that changes perseverative reaching. What does the model predict before the outcome is known?
- Explain how processes within a trial could contribute to change across development. Identify the evidence needed to connect those timescales.
Consider afterwards
- Changing posture removes a search error. Which claim about an infant’s knowledge would this result challenge, and why would it still not show that representations play no role?
Editorial context
This concise theoretical article illustrates a dynamic-systems program through perseverative reaching. The model’s explanatory value depends on specific mechanisms and predictions, not merely the statement that many things interact. A-not-B reaching and looking at an occluded object impose different demands; one paradigm does not directly replicate or refute the other. The article’s success with a case study should be distinguished from evidence for a general account of every developmental change.