ABSTRACT
As action capabilities emerge during the first year of life, infants should attend to information that is useful for guiding those actions (Gibson, 1988). For example, crawling and walking infants are sensitive to changes in the terrain which hold consequences for their preferred mode of locomotion (Gibson, Riccio, Schmuckler, Stoffregen, Rosenberg, & Taormina, 1987). We are concerned with infants’ perception of variations in ground surfaces during the development of independent locomotion. Specifically, our focus is on changes in exploratory behavior as crawling infants encounter ground surfaces with varied consequences for locomotion. We expected exploration to increase when there were consequences for action (i.e., changes in the roughness or extent of a surface or the addition of an obstacle) compared to when consequences were minimal (i.e., changes in color or texture).
