Seeing, Reaching, Touching: Relations Between Vision and Touch in Infancy

Seeing, reaching, and touching are simple, automatic, and fundamental acts for an adult, but they place formidable demands on the perceptual and motor capacities of an infant. In this book, Arlette Streri investigates the relationship between tactile and visual systems in infancy and introduces an original theory of the visual-touching mechanism in babies, a precocious ability that is central to cognitive development. Since antiquity, philosophers have asked whether seeing and touching are separate systems or are unified at birth. Contemporary psychologists approach the question from two either they consider motor ability as the integrated link between the senses or they study the relations between the information gained from two or more sense modalities. Streri demonstrates that, although current research confirms both perspectives, the results are insufficient to provide an understanding of the conditions necessary for the establishment of a unity of the two systems. Streri brings together a wealth of research on the sensorimotor and perceptual capacity of infants. Against the background of a spectrum of developmental and cognitive theories, she argues that an early developing coordination of vision and touch, and of perception and action, underlies the infant's exchanges with his or her surroundings.