Joint attention has been extensively studied in the developmental literature because of overwhelming evidence that the ability to socially coordinate visual attention to an object is essential to healthy developmental outcomes, including language learning. The goal of this study was to understand the complex system of sensory-motor behaviors that…

Human toddlers learn about objects through second-by-second, minute-by-minute sensory-motor interactions. In an effort to understand how toddlers' bodily actions structure the visual learning environment, mini-video cameras were placed low on the foreheads of toddlers, and for comparison also on the foreheads of their parents, as they jointly…

Skilled behavior requires a balance between previously successful behaviors and new behaviors appropriate to the present context. We describe a dynamic field model for understanding this balance in infant perseverative reaching. The model predictions are tested with regard to the interaction of two aspects of the typical perseverative reaching…

Recent research has shown that 2-year-olds fail at a task that ostensibly only requires the ability to understand that solid objects cannot pass through other solid objects. Two experiments were conducted in which 2- and 3-year-olds judged the stopping point of an object as it moved at varying speeds along a path and behind an occluder, stopping…

This book presents a comprehensive and detailed theory of early human development based on the principles of dynamic systems theory. It raises fundamental questions about prevailing assumptions in the field and proposes a new theory of the development of cognition and action, unifying recent advances in dynamic systems theory with current research…