Читать книгу Infants and Children in Context - Tara L. Kuther - Страница 245

Fine motor development refers to the ability to control small movements of the fingers such as reaching and grasping. Voluntary reaching plays an important role in cognitive development because it provides new opportunities for interacting with the world. Like other motor skills, reaching and grasping begin as gross activity and are refined with time. Newborns begin by engaging in prereaching, swinging their arms and extending them toward nearby objects (Ennouri & Bloch, 1996; von Hofsten & Rönnqvist, 1993). Newborns use both arms equally and cannot control their arms and hands, so they rarely succeed in making contact with objects of interest (Lynch, Lee, Bhat, & Galloway, 2008). Prereaching stops at about 7 weeks of age.

By the end of the first month of life, most infants can lift their head while lying on their stomach.

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Voluntary reaching appears at about 3 months of age and slowly improves in accuracy. At 5 months, infants can successfully reach for moving objects. By 7 months, the arms can reach independently, and infants are able to reach for an object with one arm rather than both (Spencer et al., 2000). By 10 months, infants can reach for moving objects that change direction (Fagard, Spelke, & von Hofsten, 2009). As they gain experience with reaching and acquiring objects, infants develop cognitively because they learn by exploring and playing with objects—and object preferences change with experience. In one study, 4- to 6-month-old infants with less reaching experience spent more time looking at and exploring larger objects, whereas 5- to 6-month-old infants with more reaching experience spent more time looking at and touching smaller objects. The older infants did this despite first looking at and touching the largest object (Libertus et al., 2013). With experience, infants’ attention moves away from the motor skill (like the ability to coordinate their movement to hit a mobile), to the object (the mobile), as well as to the events that occur before and after acquiring the object (how the mobile swings and how grabbing it stops the swinging or how batting at it makes it swing faster). In this way, infants learn about cause and how to solve simple problems.