Gliga Teodora
School of Psychology, University of East Anglia, Norwich, United Kingdom.
Centre for Brain and Cognitive Development, Birkbeck, University of London, London, United Kingdom.
Front Psychol. 2018 Oct 12;9:1939. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2018.01939. eCollection 2018.
Infants' minutes long babbling bouts or repetitive reaching for or mouthing of whatever they can get their hands on gives very much the impression of active exploration, a building block for early learning. But how can we tell apart active exploration from the activity of an immature motor system, attempting but failing to achieve goal directed behavior? I will focus here on evidence that infants increase motor activity and variability when faced with opportunities to gather new information (about their own bodies or the world) and propose this as a guiding principle for separating variability generated for exploration from noise. I will discuss mechanisms generating movement variability, and suggests that, in the various forms it takes, from deliberate hypothesis testing to increasing environmental variability, it could be exploited for learning. However, understanding how variability in motor acts contributes to early learning will require more in-depth investigations of both the nature of and the contextual modulation of this variability.
婴儿长时间的咿呀学语，或者反复伸手去够他们能拿到的任何东西并放进嘴里，这给人一种非常明显的积极探索的印象，而积极探索是早期学习的基石。但是，我们如何区分积极探索与不成熟运动系统的活动呢？不成熟运动系统试图实现目标导向行为却未能成功。在这里，我将重点探讨这样的证据：当婴儿面对获取新信息（关于他们自己的身体或世界）的机会时，他们会增加运动活动和变异性，并提出这作为区分因探索而产生的变异性与噪音的指导原则。我将讨论产生运动变异性的机制，并指出，从有意的假设检验到增加环境变异性等它所呈现的各种形式，都可以被用于学习。然而，要理解运动行为中的变异性如何促进早期学习，还需要对这种变异性的本质和情境调节进行更深入的研究。
