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The relation between infants' perception of catchableness and the control of catching

Paulion van Hof1, John van der Kamp, Geert J P Savelsbergh

  • 1Institute for Fundamental and Clinical Human Movement Sciences, VU University Amsterdam.

Developmental Psychology
|January 16, 2008
PubMed

Insights

Infants improve their ball-catching skills and perception with age. They learn to adjust their actions based on their ability to catch, demonstrating a link between perception and motor control development.

Area of Science:

  • Developmental psychology
  • Motor control
  • Infant perception

Background:

  • Understanding how infants develop adaptive behaviors is crucial.
  • Locomotion and action control are key areas of infant development research.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To investigate the development of perception and action in prelocomotor infants.
  • To examine how infants judge and execute ball-catching movements.

Main Methods:

  • Presented 35 infants (3-9 months) with approaching balls using a staircase procedure.
  • Measured reaching attempts, successful interceptions, and timing/distance at movement onset.
  • Analyzed the relationship between perceptual judgments and motor strategies.

Main Results:

  • Infant catching skill and perception of 'catchableness' improved with age.
  • Infants began to consider their own catching ability in judgments.
  • Accurate perception correlated with adaptive time-control strategies; imprecise perception correlated with distance-control strategies.

Conclusions:

  • Infant perception development is closely linked to the visual control of action.
  • Even before walking, infants integrate perceptual information with motor capabilities.
  • This study supports the idea that perception and action develop in tandem.

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