Perception, action, and intrinsic motivation play an essential role in early development, promoting the creation and refinement of new and more complex forms of behaviors as infants try a range of sensorimotor patterns in their environment. I use the example of infants’ reaching to illustrate how goal-directed action emerges from the intersection of seemingly distinct visual and proprioceptive-tactile-motor spaces that form in the early months following birth. The intersection of these two spaces begins with a casual contingent event involving vision and action: when the hand happens to contact a target. This event, which marks the onset of reaching, provides new behavioral value, reinforces the motor action, and intrinsically motivates infants to attempt to reproduce the behavior. Subsequent repeated cycles of perception and action lead to the exploration of a range of motor responses and a progressive alignment of the visual space with the proprioceptive-tactile-motor space, ultimately fostering the selection and refinement of increasingly successful and refined reaching patterns. Extensive hands-on experience in the environment and learning about the immediate outcomes of actions play a critical role in shaping behavioral development.

感知、行动和内在动机在早期发展中起着至关重要的作用，随着婴儿在其环境中尝试一系列感觉运动模式，促进了新的和更复杂的行为形式的创造和完善。我用婴儿伸手的例子来说明目标导向的行动是如何从出生后最初几个月形成的看似不同的视觉和本体感觉-触觉-运动空间的交叉点中产生的。这两个空间的交集始于一个涉及视觉和动作的偶然偶然事件：当手碰巧接触到目标时。这一事件标志着到达的开始，提供了新的行为价值，加强了运动动作，并从内在激励婴儿尝试重现该行为。随后的感知和行动的重复循环导致对一系列运动反应的探索以及视觉空间与本体-触觉-运动空间的渐进对齐，最终促进对越来越成功和精致的到达模式的选择和改进。在环境中的广泛实践经验和了解行动的直接结果在塑造行为发展方面起着至关重要的作用。