The impact of motor experience on object exploration, motor competence, and action understanding

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Actions are prepared and executed by an impressive interplay between the sensory system (what we see) and the motor system (how we move). Additionally, we incorporate what we know about the desired object and its properties. The proposed research project will address this complex interplay by investigating the impact of motor experience on infants' acquisition of physical knowledge and object exploration, motor competence, and action understanding. Acquisition of physical knowledge: Successful acting in the physical world requires sophisticated knowledge about object properties and the kind of actions that they afford. Infants learn about relevant object properties through optimised perception-action routines, and they also integrate that information into their object-directed actions (Gibson & Pick, 2000). For example, an object's material provides cues that allow us to infer its weight and to guide our actions prospectively (Smith et al., 1985). Recent research also demonstrated that infants as young as 9 months of age apply knowledge acquired through exploration to subsequent reaching actions (J3). Slightly older infants relate the weight of an object to its material and transfer this knowledge to new objects (J7, J6, J4). The proposed studies will investigate the influence of manual experience on infants' looking behaviour, as well as the influence of perceived weight-related behaviour on subsequent reaching preference and explorative behaviour providing further evidence for the bidirectional connection of perceptual and motor systems. Motor competence: Recent studies indicate that the onset of self-locomotion coincides with a number of cognitive skills. For example, the ability to crawl is associated with more flexible memory retrieval in goal-related imitation tasks by 9 months of age (Herbert et al., 2007), and the ability to walk seems to be related to infants' language development (Walle & Campos, 2013). The onset of crawling and walking also corresponds with major advances in social development (Clearfield, 2011), enhances the recognition and perception of such movements (BC2; Sanefuji, Ohgami, & Hashiya, 2008), and facilitates the detection of body-constraint violations (Hauf, MacDonald, & Giese, in prep). The proposed research will further deepen our understanding of the impact of motor experience on movement perception by following pre-crawling infants until they are experienced walkers. During this time, motor development will be recorded, and different perception tasks related to body movements and goal-directed actions will be conducted. Furthermore, the influence of visual and motor enhancement sessions on infants' perception and production of movements will be examined. Action understanding: The development of action understanding during the first years of life is an important issue in cognitive development. In recent years, research has focused on the bi-directional interplay of action perception and action production (BC4). These findings - supported by research on the mirror-neuron system (Falck-Ytter, Gredebäck, & von Hofsten, 2006) - suggest that, even in infancy, there is a close linkage between action perception and production. The proposed research program will systematically investigate how important motor and perceptual systems are for action understanding, and how possible development in one system impacts the capacities of the other. For example, visual stimuli will direct infants' attention to special features of action scenes, facilitating action understanding. Likewise, agentive experience will enhance infants' motor capacities required to perform a specific goal-directed action, which, in turn, will facilitate understanding of perceived actions performed by others.