George Butterworth

Development in Infancy: A Quarter Century of Empirical and Theoretical Progress

This chapter attempts a synthesis and offers a commentary on the contributions to part II, on infant development. The papers are reviewed with respect to four issues:

Origins of the Proprioceptive Function of Vision: Visual Control of Posture in One Day Old Domestic Chicks

Recently hatched domestic chicks control their upright bipedal posture, at least in part, with respect to the flow of visual information at the retina, as do human infants when they first acquire control of the head, of sitting, and of standing. Some implications of the similarity of the proprioceptive function of vision in chicks and in humans for the origins and development of postural control are discussed.

Knowledge and Representation: The acquisition of knowledge in infancy

Theories of cognitive growth depend upon the assumptions about the origins of development on which they are founded. Jean Piaget’s theory, a representationalist realist account, is based on the assumption that development originates in a limited set of sensori-motor activities which progressively impose structure on experience. An alternative, presentationalist realist account, based on James Gibson’s theorising, can be supported by much recent evidence on infant perceptioa The assumption here is that development originates in the structured information available to perceptual systems. The evidence is reviewed in the context of the development of spatial knowledge during infancy. The relation between perception and action and mechanisms for the acquisition of concepts from perceptual data are considered in the light of contemporary selectionist approaches to categorisation and cognitive development.