On the Move : Science and Development Behind Learning Sensorimotor Contingencies in the Mobile Paradigm

Sammanfattning: Exploring the body and environment is essential for development. Detecting and learning contingent relationships between one’s own actions and their consequences instantiates such exploration. Furthermore, it facilitates the development of sense of agency, body awareness, and consciousness. The mobile paradigm has been extensively used in developmental psychology to study the ability to learn and remember sensorimotor contingencies. It has broadened our understanding of motor and cognitive capacities in early infancy. The studies in this thesis focused on the role of sensorimotor contingencies in early development as well as investigated the scientific credibility of the mobile paradigm findings. The aim was to scrutinize the past work on the mobile paradigm so that we can understand whether its basic claims on human development are reliable and reflect true state of infant abilities in the first few months of life.The first study (Study I) reviewed the literature on the mobile paradigm and identified its methodological and theoretical limitations. The methodological integrity assessment (Study II) was conducted to assess the extent to which the methodological choices made 50 years ago influenced the extant findings in the mobile paradigm literature. Lastly, Study III revisited some of the most important findings of the mobile paradigm literature comprising both that young infants can learn sensorimotor contingencies and that they can differentially increase the response of the limb creating contingent feedback in the mobile paradigm (i.e., response differentiation ability). Study III also aimed to shed light on an unresolved debate in developmental psychology literature regarding whether response differentiation ability emerges before 5 months of age.Collectively, Study I and Study II provided an external critique of the mobile paradigm literature. While Study I pointed to important theoretical and methodological limitations, the results of Study II showed that methodological choices (e.g., operational definitions of learning and memory, learning criteria) created a significant bias in the mobile paradigm literature. More specifically, the finding that the majority of the mobile paradigm literature is likely to be methodological artefacts has put the reliability of the extant findings into question. As a replication attempt with contemporary research practices, Study III demonstrated that young infants can learn sensorimotor contingencies. On the other hand, Study III provided evidence that response differentiation ability in early infancy emerges later than previously suggested.