Motor and Cognitive Functions of the Hand in Infancy and Childhood

Abstract

This paper reviews recent work on the development of the perceptual information-seeking function of the hand in relation to its motor-executive function. The general argument is that from five to six months of age, i.e. when the movements of the hand begin to be systematically controlled by vision, manual haptic competences are consistently under-used and are obscured by a strong visual dominance. Although intramodal haptic discrimination and visual-tactual cross modal transfer take place very early in infancy, infants and children make poor use of their manual perceptual abilities. Consequently, their observed performance on bimodal visual-haptic tasks and in cross modal tasks do not fully support Gibson's hypothesis of amodal processing of perceptual information.

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