ABSTRACT
From birth, infants can move the articulators and spend a good deal of time performing spontaneous behaviors. These initial movements can be thought of as the source of developmental change in that they allow infants to discover things about their bodies and its potential for action, as well as properties of their surroundings. The problem for the infant is how to sculpt these initial movements into useful goal-directed actions. That is, they must learn to coordinate a large number of independent variables (e.g., the very many combinations of body segments, patterns of muscle innervation, joint angles, cell firing, etc.) to work together to achieve a movement outcome or action. The challenge for developmental theory is to explain how such a process is possible. Recently, the dynamical perspective has been considered well-suited for addressing such issues regarding the emergence of complex and stable behavioral patterns due to its reliance on self-organizing principles of stability, instability, and behavioral transitions in characterizing how patterns emerge from the interaction of many components (e.g., Kugler, 1986; Kugler, Kelso, & Turvey, 1982; Thelen, 1986, 1989, 1995; Thelen & Smith, 1994; Turvey & Fitzpatrick, 1993).
