ABSTRACT
This chapter is devoted to the examination of facts and hypotheses concerning the formative processes of action, and more particularly the role of perceptions and intermodal connections in sensory motor interactions. Acting calls for the harmonization of movement and perception. In the human infant, the issue of the relationships between perceptual modalities and action cannot be approached directly. We first need to examine what action refers to at the early phases of life, and what criteria can be retained for the behavioral repertories accessible to us. Similarly, we need to know what an infant can apprehend perceptually in the situations where the infant can produce observable changes. At first sight, to act calls for a linkage between exteroception and proprioception, and we should consider that intermodal relations are always implied. However, as we discuss later, proprioceptive sensitivity in early infancy is still not well understood and we do not know whether or how infants use prioprioceptive information in relation with exteroceptive information. Moreover, it may be that the possible linkage differs from one exteroceptive modality to another. So it is not easy to approach the multimodal relations in the infant’s action, considering that they are parts of a common dynamic. A possible way to unpack them could be to adopt a functionalistic orientation. With such an orientation, I deliberately restrict myself here to perspectives that seek to account for fairly well-defined behaviors or clearly identified changes. This chapter focuses primarily on the organization of actions as sensory-motor combinations, rather than on their cognitive consequences as object or spatial knowledge. Most often, cognitive theories of development have considered the outcome of action rather than its mechanisms. However, understanding the mechanisms of action does not prevent any cognitive interpretation but only requires that indicators of cognition could be extracted from the observed relations between perception and movement while the individual is acting. The methods of study I stress here are experimental and owe a great deal to advances in technology since the mid 1970s. This progress has yielded a harvest of empirical data that is still insufficient and at times lacks coherence. This, at least in part, explains the clashes between various theoretical positions present in the current literature. The overview presented here is thus provisional.
