Daniela Corbetta
Department of Psychology, the University of Tennessee-Knoxville, USA
In recent years, my lab has started to document the sensorimotor activity of infants in the 0-2 months old range with the scope of understanding how spontaneous activity during this early developmental period contributes to the development of self-agency, specifically in relation to goal-directed actions. The 0-2 months period is a much-understudied developmental period. One reason for this neglect may be linked to the views that we have of infants at this early age — that they cannot do much. For instance, they sleep a lot, do not see well, and when active, they can’t control their head, can’t organize their movements, and cannot sustain attention for long at all.
In this talk, I will present data that reveal a very different developmental picture – one showing that from very early, infant’s emerging active self is already at work. The data are derived from the observations of a few infants that we followed intensely and at close intervals from 3 to 10-12 weeks of age. We documented several of these infants’ self-generated behaviors: head turn activity, touches to their own body and surrounding surface, and arm movements in their peripersonal space. These data distinctly show that the sensorimotor experience that these young infants acquire in these first postnatal weeks is immense and a direct product of their emergent active self. I will further illustrate how this early sensorimotor experience contributes to the development of self-agency when infants discover how to produce their initial attempts to reach for objects.
DFG SPP "The Active Self" 