Speakers - 2026

Title: More than reflexes: active manual behaviour in early infancy

Abstract

Infants are involved actively in exploratory behaviours to identify regularities between self-produced actions and their consequences in the environment. In the last 40 years the literature has shown that early infant behaviours are much more than reflexive reactions. Focussing on early hands behaviour we have designed a device and an experimental set up to investigate goal-directed manual behaviour in which infants have the opportunity to control their hands and influence the environment. I have been investigating how infants from 1 to 3 months old use their hands through clutching behaviour. Descriptive analysis has shown that as infants age they clutch more often, faster, and with increasing variability. Also, when exposed to contingent and non-contingent conditions infants can clutch differently according to environmental condition. I will present new findings on early manual learning after 3 days of practice in the contingent paradigm. The results show that infants modulate their manual activity according to environmental contingencies indicating a perception-action mechanism that makes them aware of the effects of their actions in the environment. To wrap up, some suggestions on early stimulation of manual behavior will be presented to increase opportunities to infants to explore their hands. potential.