Papers by Daniela Corbetta
Sensors, Jul 18, 2023
This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative... more This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY
Oxford University Press eBooks, 1988
The book comprises two ethnoarchaeological studies whose aim is the construction of a reference k... more The book comprises two ethnoarchaeological studies whose aim is the construction of a reference knowledge for interpreting archaeological data, according to the principles of verification against empirical data. The first study deals with the concept of craft specialization. This is a commonly encountered concept since it describes the emergence of complex societies. The question is to find material critria significant of pottery specialization that are receivable from an epistemological point of view. With this purpose in mind, the authors conducted a study on apprenticeship in wheel throwing technique. Perceptual motor tests, potters' gestures and experimental products are studied. They show that the apprenticeship in throwing technique is necessarily long and difficult taking into account the motor activities which have to be developed. Based on this, the authors propose to associate the material fact "throwing technique" to the attribute "craft specialization&...
Mapping the feel of the arm with the sight of the object: on
Current Directions in Psychological Science, 2021
Perception, action, and intrinsic motivation play an essential role in early development, promoti... more Perception, action, and intrinsic motivation play an essential role in early development, promoting the creation and refinement of new and more complex forms of behaviors as infants try a range of sensorimotor patterns in their environment. I use the example of infants’ reaching to illustrate how goal-directed action emerges from the intersection of seemingly distinct visual and proprioceptive-tactile-motor spaces that form in the early months following birth. The intersection of these two spaces begins with a casual contingent event involving vision and action: when the hand happens to contact a target. This event, which marks the onset of reaching, provides new behavioral value, reinforces the motor action, and intrinsically motivates infants to attempt to reproduce the behavior. Subsequent repeated cycles of perception and action lead to the exploration of a range of motor responses and a progressive alignment of the visual space with the proprioceptive-tactile-motor space, ultim...
Laterality, 2020
Although a population bias toward right-hand preference is observed at the early stage of graspin... more Although a population bias toward right-hand preference is observed at the early stage of grasping, it is well known that at the group level hand preference is not very strong in young infants and fluctuates until the second year and even beyond. Given these fluctuations, one can wonder whether testing a young infant on a single occasion gives reliable results of its handedness. Several studies have investigated fluctuations over months or weeks but very few studies have evaluated short-term test-retest reliability. This was the goal of this study in which 21 infants aged 9 to 15 months were tested for handedness every day or with exceptionally two days between successive sessions for a total of 5 sessions. At all sessions, the infants were given the same classical handedness baby test in which 8 to 16 objects (mean: 11.25) were presented at the midline. Their handedness index (HI) and their category of handedness derived from their HI were compared across sessions. The results show that at the group level the distribution of handedness does not differ significantly across the five sessions. At the individual level, only 19% of infants were categorized as right-handed at all five sessions while 47.6% were consistent in using more the right hand than the left across the five sessions. When adding one infant whose consistency was to use more her left-hand across sessions, the overall consistency in direction of hand preference was 52.4%. Most of the fluctuations across sessions occurred between being right-handed and non-lateralized or between being left-handed and nonlateralized, rather than between being right-handed and left-handed. In addition, when the results of the first sessions were compared with the results from all other sessions, changes in category of handedness occurred only for one infant (4.8%). Most infants who changed category, changed from being lateralized to not being lateralized or the reverse. More than half of the infants remained in the same category. These results indicate that testing handedness at the ages of 9 to 15 months gives fairly reliable results in terms of direction of hand preference, but less so in terms of its degree.
Kinesiology Review, 2018
This article reviews the literature on infant reaching, from past to present, to recount how our ... more This article reviews the literature on infant reaching, from past to present, to recount how our understanding of the emergence and development of this early goal-directed behavior has changed over the decades. We show that the still widely-accepted view, which considers the emergence and development of infant reaching as occurring primarily under the control of vision, is no longer sustainable. Increasing evidence suggests that the developmental origins of infant reaching is embodied. We discuss the implications of this alternative view for the development of eye-hand coordination and we propose a new scenario stressing the importance of the infant body-centered sensorimotor experiences in the months prior to the emergence of reaching as a possible critical step for the formation of eye-hand coordination.
Le Centre pour la Communication Scientifique Directe - HAL - Diderot, Sep 11, 2019
The development of head control in early infancy has been studied for quite a long time (e.g. Tur... more The development of head control in early infancy has been studied for quite a long time (e.g. Turkewitz, 1965 ; Rönnqvist, Hopkins, 1998 ; Lima-Alvarez, et al., 2014). Two overarching conclusions from these studies are that prior to 2 months of age, infants' head control is weak, especially when in the supine position, and that the majority of infants prefer turning their head to the right side. In most of these studies, an experimenter momentarily held the infants head at midline before releasing it, or presented a visual stimulus to induce head turn. Very little is known, however, about the development of infants' spontaneous head movements during this early period. METHOD Spontaneous head movements were explored in 3 infants (GM, LN and MA) followed weekly from the age of 3 to 12 weeks, until they acquired head control. Infants were observed in 5 conditions: baseline, toys-in-view (preferred head turn side), musical toys outof-view (non-preferred head turn side), mobile overhead, and mother reading to infant. The toys-in-view condition was not considered for this poster since the head would more likely remain turned in that condition. Each condition lasted 5 min while infants laid in supine on a white padded surface surrounded by two vertical white panels to block distractions from the surroundings. Two synched cameras, placed overhead and to the side, recorded the whole session. Head movements were coded with respect to the frontal plane at a frequency of 15 Hz with a custom software which provided 2D kinematic data of selected points on the video (VideoAnalyser, Mare, 2010, figure 1). Data were filtered. The infants' nose was the body point of interest selected to describe head turns (figure 2). The rate of change, direction, and duration of head turns were extracted and compared across conditions within each session. Non-parametric Friedman and Durbin-Conover tests were used to compare the head movements between the conditions.
Psychologie du corps et de l’apparence, 2020
Infant Behavior and Development, 2015
The effects of &a... more The effects of "sticky" and "non-sticky" mittens upon the progression of intentional reaching were examined over 16-day training in 24 non-reaching infants aged 2 months and 21 days. Thirteen age-matched controls did not receive training. Both mittens groups progressed over time; however, by day 16, only the "non-sticky" group made significantly more toy contacts than the controls when looking at the toy. Infants in the "non-sticky" group also directed their looking at the toy more than infants in the "sticky" mittens group. These results support the interpretation that repeated task exposure, with active, reaching-specific experience, was more likely to enhance the formation of object-directed behaviors than with the added provision of grasping simulation via…
Frontiers in psychology, 2014
For decades, the emergence and progression of infant reaching was assumed to be largely under the... more For decades, the emergence and progression of infant reaching was assumed to be largely under the control of vision. More recently, however, the guiding role of vision in the emergence of reaching has been downplayed. Studies found that young infants can reach in the dark without seeing their hand and that corrections in infants' initial hand trajectories are not the result of visual guidance of the hand, but rather the product of poor movement speed calibration to the goal. As a result, it has been proposed that learning to reach is an embodied process requiring infants to explore proprioceptively different movement solutions, before they can accurately map their actions onto the intended goal. Such an account, however, could still assume a preponderant (or prospective) role of vision, where the movement is being monitored with the scope of approximating a future goal-location defined visually. At reach onset, it is unknown if infants map their action onto their vision, vision ...
Infancy
Network analysis is a tool typically used to assess interrelationships between social entities in... more Network analysis is a tool typically used to assess interrelationships between social entities in a system. In this methodological report, we introduce how concepts from network analysis can be utilized to capture, condense, and extract complex developmental changes in individual behaviors over time. Using infant postural-locomotor development as an example, we demonstrate how network analysis principles can be applied to rich empirical data. We used existing free-play data from 13 infants followed longitudinally as they progressed from sitting to walking. We documented the range of postures adopted during play, how often infants transitioned between postures in their postural networks, and derived parameters of density and centrality. Analysis revealed that posture network density increased after infants learned to crawl and gained crawling experience as one might expect, but density did not further expand with gains in upright locomotion. Certain postures held different roles in the overall posture network displayed by an infant, and these centrality patterns depended on the time period involved. More central postures in the network were not always postures in which infants spent the most time. We discuss how network analysis might be utilized to better understand infant behaviors in other contexts (e.g., problem-solving, interventions, humanoid robotics).
Frontiers in Psychology
This longitudinal study assessed how infants and mothers used different postures and modulated th... more This longitudinal study assessed how infants and mothers used different postures and modulated their interactions with their surroundings as the infants progressed from sitting to walking. Thirteen infants and their mothers were observed biweekly throughout this developmental period during 10 min laboratory free-play sessions. For every session, we tracked the range of postures mothers and infants produced (e.g., sitting, kneeling, and standing), we assessed the type of interactions they naturally engaged in (no interactions, passive involvement, fine motor manipulation, or gross motor activity), and documented all target transitions. During the crawling transition period, when infants used sitting postures, they engaged mainly in fine motor manipulations of targets and often maintained their activity on the same target. As infants became mobile, their rate of fine motor manipulation declined during sitting but increased while kneeling/squatting. During the walking transition, their interactions with targets became more passive, particularly when sitting and standing, but they also engaged in greater gross motor activity while continuing to use squatting/kneeling postures for fine motor manipulations. The walking period was also marked by an increase in target changes and more frequent posture changes during object interactions. Throughout this developmental period, mothers produced mainly no or passive activity during sitting, kneeling/squatting, and standing. As expected, during this developmental span, infants used their body in increasingly varied ways to explore and interact with their environment, but more importantly, progression in posture variations significantly altered how infants manually interacted with their surrounding world.
Encyclopedia of Animal Cognition and Behavior
The book comprises two ethnoarchaeological studies whose aim is the construction of a reference k... more The book comprises two ethnoarchaeological studies whose aim is the construction of a reference knowledge for interpreting archaeological data, according to the principles of verification against empirical data. The first study deals with the concept of craft specialization. This is a commonly encountered concept since it describes the emergence of complex societies. The question is to find material critria significant of pottery specialization that are receivable from an epistemological point of view. With this purpose in mind, the authors conducted a study on apprenticeship in wheel throwing technique. Perceptual motor tests, potters' gestures and experimental products are studied. They show that the apprenticeship in throwing technique is necessarily long and difficult taking into account the motor activities which have to be developed. Based on this, the authors propose to associate the material fact "throwing technique" to the attribute "craft specialization&...
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Papers by Daniela Corbetta