Daniela Corbetta

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Verified

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• Ph.D.
• Professor (Full) at University of Tennessee at Knoxville

Background Spontaneous movements are a crucial part of early motor development. Healthy term infants may produce up to 200 spontaneous touches to their body and surface in 10 minutes with their hands. The existing literature shows differences in early motor development between very preterm (<32 weeks gestation) and healthy term infants. It is not k...

The principle of Fitts’ law explains that the difficulty of movement increases when targets are farther away and narrower in width, particularly when touching two parallel targets as quickly as possible. Understanding the differences in motor and gaze behaviors between extroverts and introverts when performing tasks that require speed and accuracy...

The arm postures that infants adopt in the early months of life set up a repertoire of movement patterns that may aid in the development of reaching. There is evidence of tightly flexed arm postures in the womb, but how and when arm postures change over time after birth has not been systematically documented. The present study followed infants whil...

Perception, action, and intrinsic motivation play an essential role in early development, promoting the creation and refinement of new and more complex forms of behaviors as infants try a range of sensorimotor patterns in their environment. I use the example of infants’ reaching to illustrate how goal-directed action emerges from the intersection o...

Network analysis is a tool typically used to assess interrelationships between social entities in a system. In this methodological report, we introduce how concepts from network analysis can be utilized to capture, condense, and extract complex developmental changes in individual behaviors over time. Using infant postural-locomotor development as a...

Although a population bias toward right-hand preference is observed at the early stage of grasping, hand preference fluctuates in infancy. Given these fluctuations, one can wonder whether testing a young infant on a single occasion gives reliable results of its handedness. Very few studies have evaluated short-term test-retest reliability. This was...

This longitudinal study assessed how infants and mothers used different postures and modulated their interactions with their surroundings as the infants progressed from sitting to walking. Thirteen infants and their mothers were observed biweekly throughout this developmental period during 10 min laboratory free-play sessions. For every session, we...

Self-generated touches to the body or supporting surface are considered important contributors to the emergence of an early sense of the body and self in infancy. Both are critical for the formation of later goal-directed actions. Very few studies have examined in detail the development of these early spontaneous touches during the first months of...

Reaching for objects in our surroundings is an everyday activity that most humans perform seamlessly a hundred times a day. It is nonetheless a complex behavior that requires the perception of objects’ features, action selection, movement planning, multi-joint coordination, force regulation, and the integration of all of these properties during the...

In this chapter, we discuss how perception and action are intimately linked to the processes of exploration and selection. Exploration, which we define as trying several variations of the behavior, and selection, which involves attempting to reproduce the behaviors that work, are essential for learning about the environment, discovering the propert...

This article reviews the literature on infant reaching, from past to present, to recount how our understanding of the emergence and development of this early goal-directed behavior has changed over the decades. We show that the still widely-accepted view, which considers the emergence and development of infant reaching as occurring primarily under...

We used eye tracking to investigate where infants and adults directed their gaze on a scene right before reaching. Infants aged 5, 7, 9, and 11 months old and adults looked at a human hand holding an object out of reach for 5 s, then the hand moved the object toward the participant for reaching. We analyzed which part of the scene (the object, the...

Infants' motor skill development triggers changes in parent-infant interactions, exploration, and play behaviors, particularly during periods of locomotor transitions. We investigated how these transitions reorganized infants' and mothers' explorations of spatial layouts. Thirteen infants and their mothers were followed biweekly from the age of 6 t...

Prior research on infant reaching has shown that providing infants with repeated opportunities to reach for objects aids the emergence and progression of reaching behavior. This study investigated the effect of movement consequences on the process of learning to reach in pre-reaching infants. Thirty-five infants aged 2.9 months at the onset of the...

This study examines the process of learning to walk from a functional perspective. To move forward, one must generate and control propulsive forces. To achieve this, it is necessary to create and tune a distance between the centre of mass (CoM) and the centre of pressure (CoP) along the antero-posterior axis. We hypothesize that learning to walk co...

The development of reaching in infancy has been the focus of much research attention for many decades. Several accounts have been put forth to explain the processes leading to the emergence of this fundamental behavior. In recent years, however, the dynamic systems, neuronal group selection, and approximate optimal control perspectives have contrib...

One of the most common lateral asymmetries investigated in newborns is the direction of their spontaneous head turn (HT). Prior studies have observed greater preferred head turns to the right and have argued that such direction preference predicted the predominant direction of later hand preference to the right. However few studies examined whether...

This article reviews the sensory-motor behavioral progression of typically developing human infants from birth to about 1 year of age. The authors focus on the different sensory-motor achievements that each period of development requires as infants progress toward the acquisition of upright locomotion and the acquisition of adaptive goal-directed r...

For decades, the emergence and progression of infant reaching was assumed to be largely under the control of vision. More recently, however, the guiding role of vision in the emergence of reaching has been downplayed. Studies found that young infants can reach in the dark without seeing their hand and that corrections in infants' initial hand traje...

Hand preference in infancy is marked by many developmental shifts in hand use and arm coupling as infants reach for and manipulate objects. Research has linked these early shifts in hand use to the emergence of fundamental postural–locomotor milestones. Specifically, it was found that bimanual reaching declines when infants learn to sit; increases...

Longitudinal studies tracking the early development of manual asymmetries are fairly rare compared to the large number of studies assessing hand preference in infancy. Moreover, most prior longitudinal studies have performed behavioral observation over relatively short-time spans considering the celerity of early development. This study aims (i) to...

Research has shown that infants begin to walk independently by using one of three whole-body strategies (i.e., stepping, twisting, or falling) 1. The transition to walking was also found to induce a temporary increase in bimanual reaching while seated 2. This research examined the extent to which the observed increase in seated bimanual reaching is...

The current eye-tracking study explored the relative impact of object size and depth cues on 8-month-old infants' visual attention processes. A series of slides containing 3 objects of either different or same size were displayed on backgrounds with varying depth cues. The distribution of infants' first looks (a measure of initial attention switch)...

For several decades, the role of vision in the development of infant reaching has been considered crucial. Over the past 15 years, however, this role has been questioned by a number of studies which have shown that young babies are capable of contacting objects in the dark and that, even in complete visibility conditions, they use primarily proprio...

Résumé Depuis plusieurs décennies, le rôle de la vision dans le développement de la préhension chez le bébé a été considéré comme crucial. Durant ces 15 dernières années, cependant, ce rôle a été remis en question par des travaux qui ont montré que les jeunes bébés sont capables de contacter les objets dans le noir et que, même dans des conditions...

This paper presents two methods that we applied to our research to record infant gaze in the context of goal-oriented actions using different eye-tracking devices: head-mounted and remote eye-tracking. For each type of eye-tracking system, we discuss their advantages and disadvantages, we describe the particular experimental setups we used to study...

Estudos com desenho longitudinal na área das assimetrias laterais nos primeiros anos de vida são raros. A literatura existente neste período refere que a maioria dos estudos de observação comportamental utiliza amostras temporais muito espaçadas face à celeridade do desenvolvimento. Sendo evidente a vantagem na salvaguarda do realismo ecológico dos...

Learning to walk is viewed here from a functional point of view. To move forward it is necessary to produce propulsive forces that necessitate creating and tuning a distance between the center of mass (CoM) and the center of pressure (CoP) along the anteroposterior axis .We hypothesize that learning to walk consists in learning to produce these pro...

NASPSPA

This chapter concentrates on the development of actions in the first years of life and the challenges that infants must overcome to function effectively in the environment. After introducing themes and definitions in the study of action, we focus on the development of reaching, grasping, walking, and object manipulation. The study of action, broadl...

CONF. HUMAN DEV.

This chapter focuses on the role that the body plays in the process of brain and mind formation. It begins by reviewing some theoretical concepts about embodiment and the dynamic systems approach. It then considers three examples of infant motor development that illustrate the strong coupling existing between the body and the mind in development, a...

ICIS

Researchers agree that infants must learn from prior sensory-motor experiences to plan, perform, and fine-tune their actions to the environment. Yet, little is known about the actual influences of these experiences on the development of infants’ perception and action. This study investigated how repeated experiences of seeing, reaching for, touchin...

Learning to walk is a dynamic process requiring the fine coordination, assembly, and balancing of many body segments at once. For the young walker, coordinating all these behavioral levels may be quite daunting. In this study, we examine the whole-body strategies to which infants resort to produce their first independent steps and progress over the...

This paper is in memory of Esther Thelen, who passed away while President of the Society for Research in Child Development. A survey of Esther Thelen's career reveals a trajectory from early work on simple movements like stepping, to the study of goal-directed reaching, to work on the embodiment of cognition, and, ultimately, to a grand theory of d...

Previous research revealed that shifting patterns of hand preference in the first year of life are linked to infants' sensory-motor experiences as they learn to sit, creep, and walk. In this report, we examine whether new and different forms of locomotion and sensory-motor experiences similarly contribute to alter patterns of hand preference in ear...

Before 12 months of age, infants have difficulties coordinating and sequencing their movements to retrieve an object concealed in a box. This study examined (a) whether young infants can discover effective retrieval solutions and consolidate movement coordination earlier if exposed regularly to such a task and (b) whether different environments, in...

Recent studies with human infants and nonhuman primates reveal that posture interacts with the expression and stability of handedness. Converging results demonstrate that quadrupedal locomotion hinders the expression of handedness, whereas bipedal posture enhances preferred hand use. From an evolutionary perspective, these findings suggest that rig...

Microdevelopment is the process of change in abilities, knowledge and understanding during short time-spans. This book presents a new process-orientated view of development and learning based on recent innovations in psychology research. Instead of characterising abilities at different ages, researchers investigate processes of development and lear...

The authors examined whether infants of about 1 year return to 2-handed reaching when they begin to walk independently. Infants (N = 9) were followed longitudinally before, during, and after their transition to upright locomotion. Every week, the infants' reaching responses and patterns of interlimb coordination were screened in 3 tasks involving d...

Why do infants make perseverative errors when reaching for two identical targets? From a dynamic systems perspective, perseverative errors emerge from repetitive perceptual–motor activity in novel and/or difficult contexts. To evaluate this account, we studied 9-month-old infants performing two tasks in which they repetitively reached toward either...

Previous studies on reaching and grasping have suggested that infants need considerable experience at both seeing and touching in order to develop responses adapted to the environment. Such an account, however, does not reveal how appropriate perception-action matching emerges from these repeated experiences at seeing and touching. The present rese...

SUMMARY Body and mind in infancy : the contribution of the dynamic systems perspective For the past few decades, the body has largely been thought to be an instrument devoted to serve the mind. Recently, however, the appearance of a new theoretical fra- mework - the dynamic systems perspective - and the rise of important discoveries in neuroscien...

To date, our understanding of learning and development of fundamental motor skills in sport still relies heavily on stage-like approaches. The aim of this article is to show how dynamic systems theory can provide compelling concepts and methods to go beyond stage approaches and study the transitions from one stage to another. We begin by introducin...

The development of hand preference in infant reaching is marked by several lateral fluctuations. This study investigated whether similar lateral fluctuations were present in infants' spontaneous, nonreaching, and freely performed movements. We collected reaching and nonreaching movements kinematics in 4 infants that we followed longitudinally durin...

When infants first learn to reach at about 4 months, their hand paths are jerky and tortuous, but their reaches become smoother and straighter over the first year. Here the authors consider the role of the underlying limb dynamics, which scale with movement speed, on the development of trajectory control. The authors observed 4 infants weekly and t...

When infants first learn to reach at about 4 months, their hand paths are jerky and tortuous, but their reaches become smoother and straighter over the first year. Here the authors consider the role of the underlying limb dynamics, which scale with movement speed, on the development of trajectory control. The authors observed 4 infants weekly and t...

Patterns of interlimb coordination associated with infant reaching fluctuate frequently over developmental time. This study investigated whether these fluctuations are related to coordination tendencies. Interlimb patterns were studied in reaching and nonreaching movements in 4 infants, which were followed through their 1st year. Each week, reachin...

Patterns of interlimb coordination associated with infant reaching fluctuate frequently over developmental time. This study investigated whether these fluctuations are related to coordination tendencies. Interlimb patterns were studied in reaching and nonreaching movements in 4 infants, which were followed through their 1st year. Each week, reachin...

Identifying the start of a movement is critical for calculating variables such as movement duration, movement speed, or trajectory length and straightness. In most experiments, the problem is simplified by giving instructions to the subjects and by constraining the task. This is not possible in populations that are too young or disabled to understa...

[this work] is inspired by the dynamical systems perspective / this perspective presupposes that the formation of movement patterns emerges naturally from the cooperative coupling of the ensemble of components that constitute the behavior identify if characteristic patterns of interlimb coordination predominated during certain periods in developm...

This chapter describes the development of brain and behavior, a dynamic systems approach to development, behavioral dynamics of learning to reach, and infant reaching and neural dynamics. The developmental process means the complex, contingent, multiply determined web of interactions that leads the organism from a single cell to a toddler who can c...

The onset of directed reaching demarks the emergence of a qualitatively new skill. In this study we asked how intentional reaching arises from infants' ongoing, intrinsic movement dynamics, and how first reaches become successively adapted to the task. We observed 4 infants weekly in a standard reaching task and identified the week of first arm-ext...

The onset of directed reaching demarks the emergence of a qualitatively new skill. In this study we asked how intentional reaching arises from infants' ongoing, intrinsic movement dynamics, and how first reaches become successively adapted to the task. We observed 4 infants weekly in a standard reaching task and identified the week of first arm-ext...

Developmental studies can inform motor neuroscience by describing the initial state of the perception-action system, identifying change and the emergence of new forms, and by determining the processes which engender these changes. We describe a research program studying the limb dynamics of human infants using a combination of kinematics, kinetics,...

The book comprises two ethnoarchaeological studies whose aim is the construction of a reference knowledge for interpreting archaeological data, according to the principles of verification against empirical data. The first study deals with the concept of craft specialization. This is a commonly encountered concept since it describes the emergence of...