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Updated: Aug 15, 2026
A View of Their Own: Capturing the Egocentric View of Infants and Toddlers with Head-Mounted Cameras
Published on: October 5, 2018
Three- to eight-month-old infants' catching under monocular and binocular vision
Paulion van Hof1, John van der Kamp, Geert J P Savelsbergh
1Institute for Fundamental and Clinical Human Movement Sciences, Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam, The Netherlands. p.vanhof@fbw.vu.nl
Insights
Infants
Area of Science:
- Developmental psychology
- Motor control
- Visual perception
Background:
- Infants' motor skills develop rapidly.
- Understanding visual cues is crucial for movement.
- Early research explored visual guidance of movement.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate how infants use monocular and binocular vision for interceptive arm movements.
- To determine developmental changes in visual cue reliance.
- To understand the role of binocular information in goal-directed movements.
Main Methods:
- Cross-sectional and longitudinal studies with 3- to 8-month-old infants.
- Observed arm movements towards approaching balls under monocular and binocular viewing.
- Varied ball size and approach velocity.
Main Results:
- Infants increasingly relied on binocular cues for movement timing with age.
- By 7-8 months, movement onset was independent of object size with binocular vision.
- Binocular viewing consistently improved spatial accuracy across all ages.
Conclusions:
- Attunement to binocular information is vital for infants' goal-directed arm movements.
- Development of optic-movement couplings occurs at different rates.
- Binocular vision plays a significant role in refining interceptive actions early in life.
Abstract:
We report a cross-sectional and a longitudinal experiment that examined developmental changes in the relative contribution of monocular and binocular variables in the guidance of interceptive arm movements. Three- to eight-month-old infants were observed while presented with differently sized balls that approached frontally with a constant velocity under both monocular and binocular viewing conditions. Movement onset indicated that with age infants increasingly came to rely on binocular variables in controlling the timing of the interceptive arm movements. That is, from 7 to 8 months of age movement onset was independent from object size under binocular but not under monocular viewing. In contrast, binocular viewing enhanced the spatial accuracy of the interceptive arm movements at all ages. We concluded that attunement to binocular information is a key process in infants' gaining adaptive control of goal-directed arm movements. However, interceptive arm movements entail the formation of multiple on-line couplings between optic and movement variables, each of which appears to develop at its own pace.
