ABSTRACT
This chapter reviews the early developmental progression of infants' reaching for objects in the first year of life. It illustrates how the current understanding of the formation of this behavior is far more complex than thought decades ago. Infants begin reaching with roughly undifferentiated arm and hand synergies before being able to develop better-refined actions tailored to specific physical properties of objects. They interact with objects and experience their own movement capabilities and limitations, they can explore and discover the unique features of objects in conjunction with their own actions, and can learn to refine their movements to apply them to an ever-wider range of situations. Infants must develop a sense of their body and limb movements in space to interact with their environment. Many behavioral components such as vision, eye-hand coordination, posture, sense of the self, body representation, visual acuity, stereopsis, and visual attention all constitute important precursors to the development of infant reaching.
