Reaching for Excellence? : Does training improve motor abilities and cause cascading effects in the visual attention and social perception domain?

Sammanfattning: claimed in the last 20 years. Being able to reach for objects provides infants with an interactive interface with their environment. After reach onset, objects can be explored closer to the face and manipulated. Social perception abilities and visual attention have both been found to relate to motor development. We can observe successful reaching and grasping between the ages of 4 and 6 months of age. Research has proposed that these abilities can be observed sooner if infants take part in a reaching training. The sticky mittens training has been put forward as a training that can help infants reach before they would normally start reaching. Moreover, the training has been suggested to increase social perception and visual attention. Therefore, the aim of this thesis is to examine whether this training affects infant abilities in these three domains (motor, social perception, and visual attention) at the age of 3 months and 10 months. In this thesis, three studies are presented. Study I described the sticky mittens field and gave an overview of what we currently know about the training’s effects. Study II examined whether the sticky mittens training affects the emergence of reaching and grasping using the original task from the sticky mittens literature and a new task. Study III examined whether the sticky mittens training affected social perception and visual attention abilities.The main results in Study I were that the sticky mittens effects are inconsistent in the motor domain and visual attention domain. However, the effects seemed robust in the social perception domain. In Study II, the main results were that the training was unable to improve reaching and grasping, as indicated by the lack of reaching and grasping in the original and new tasks. In Study III, it was found that the training did not affect social perception and visual attention. In conclusion, the training did not work in the current sample. However, there is not enough evidence to conclude that the training is either effective or ineffective.