101 WHY BABIES DON’T REACH THE WAY THEY LOOK Neil E. Berthier, Rachel K. Clifton, and Bennett I. Bertenthal Department of Psychology University of Massachusetts, Amherst, MA 01003 To date, much of the work on the ability of infants to represent information about the world and to mentally evaluate that information has come from experiments that used looking as the dependent variable. Generally, these experiments show that infants are remarkably sophisticated in their abilities. The growing literature from infants who are required to physically interact with the world in order to demonstrate such expertise has sometimes been at variance with the looking data. In our work, such deficiencies seem to be the result of both procedural aspects of our studies as well as cognitive limitations. Important considerations include the ability to integrate conceptual knowledge with the motor act, the ability of the infant to deploy attention effectively, variable motivation of the infant, task demands, and complexity of the motor action. Currently we cannot predict from looking experiments the behavior of infants in reaching experiments and vice versa. A more complete understanding of infants’ conceptual development should entail converging results from experiments where infants are required to act on the world as well as from looking experiments.

Why babies don't reach the way they look

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101

WHY BABIES DON’T REACH THE WAY THEY LOOK

Neil E. Berthier, Rachel K. Clifton, and Bennett I. Bertenthal

Department of Psychology University of Massachusetts, Amherst, MA 01003

To date, much of the work on the ability of infants to represent information about the world and to mentally evaluate that information has come from experiments that used looking as the dependent variable. Generally, these experiments show that infants are remarkably sophisticated in their abilities. The growing literature from infants who are required to physically interact with the world in order to demonstrate such expertise has sometimes been at variance with the looking data. In our work, such deficiencies seem to be the result of both procedural aspects of our studies as well as cognitive limitations. Important considerations include the ability to integrate conceptual knowledge with the motor act, the ability of the infant to deploy attention effectively, variable motivation of the infant, task demands, and complexity of the motor action. Currently we cannot predict from looking experiments the behavior of infants in reaching experiments and vice versa. A more complete understanding of infants’ conceptual development should entail converging results from experiments where infants are required to act on the world as well as from looking experiments.