Development of Eye-Hand Coordination in Infant Reaching

描述（由申请人提供）：通常认为，标志着婴儿在出生后第一年达到的出现和发展的步骤是由计划和执行运动的视觉运动过程的变化引起的。例如，以前的研究认为，在婴儿早期阶段，婴儿依靠视觉来控制和引导他们的手达到预期的目标。然后，随着手的视觉指导下降，婴儿越来越多地使用视觉来识别物体特征，并在接触之前预测他们的手的形状和轨迹。然而，最近的发现对这些解释提出了质疑。研究发现，在早期阶段，婴儿可以在黑暗中伸手，这表明他们不需要看到自己的手来引导它到达目标。而且，其他研究发现，在后期阶段，婴儿回归到非物体相关的接触配置，好像他们停止关注物体的物理特征，失去了以前的预测接触技能。根据这些最新的研究结果，我们已经不清楚视觉运动过程如何有助于第一年达到的出现和发展。由于先前的研究没有提供婴儿在伸手时眼睛运动的直接测量，因此很难确切地理解视觉如何有助于婴儿期的运动规划和执行。 目前的建议，旨在执行直接措施的婴儿视觉模式之前，期间和之后的行为达到在第一年，以确定是否，何时以及如何使用视觉的形成和发展达到。具体来说，实验将同时获得一组婴儿的眼睛运动和手臂运动学的精确模式，在第一年纵向跟踪，并在一组成人控制。当婴儿和成年人伸手去够大小和方向不同的物体时，以及当他们只是看着这些物体而不去够的时候，都会得到记录。眼睛扫描模式和关注点将在不同年龄、群体和物体条件下进行比较，并将映射到伸手的模式上。这些数据将允许确定在到达之前和到达期间以及不打算到达时注意哪些信息。根据这些数据，将评估有关婴儿1岁时眼手协调发展过程的假设。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): The steps marking the emergence and development of infant reaching in the first year of life have often been thought to result from changes in the visual-motor processes underlying the planning and execution of movements. For instance, previous accounts proposed that, at the early stages, infants relied on vision to control and guide their hand to the intended goal. Then, as visual guidance of the hand declined, infants used vision increasingly to identify object characteristics and predict the configuration and trajectory of their hand before contact. Recent discoveries, however, have questioned these interpretations. Studies have found that, at the early stages, infants can reach in the dark, suggesting that they do not need to see their hand to guide it to the target. And, other studies have found that at the later stages, infants regress to non-object-related reaching configurations as if they stopped attending to object physical characteristics and lost previous predictive reaching skills. In the light of these recent findings, it has become unclear how visual motor processes contribute to the emergence and development of reaching in the first year. Because previous research has omitted providing direct measures of infant eye movements during reaching it is difficult to understand exactly how vision contributes to movement planning and execution in infancy. The present proposal aims to perform direct measures of infant visual patterns before, during, and after the act of reaching in the 1st year in order to determine whether, when, and how vision is used in the formation and development of reaching. Specifically, experiments will simultaneously acquire precise patterns of eye movements and arm kinematics in one group of infants followed longitudinally over the 1st year and in one group of adult controls. Recordings will be obtained while infants and adults are reaching for objects varying in size and orientation, and while they are simply looking at these objects without reaching. Eye-scanning patterns and point of regard will be compared across age, groups, and object conditions, and will be mapped onto patterns of reaching. These data will allow to determine what information is attended to before and during reaching, and also when not planning to reach. From these data, hypotheses regarding the processes underlying the development of infants' eye-hand coordination in the 1st year will be assessed.