Recent research has used infants to investigate the origins of purposeful behavior, showing that agency emerges from the relationship between an organism and its environment. Using a baby mobile experiment, the researchers found that when infants recognize the ability to cause movement within the mobile through their own movements, they shift from spontaneous to intentional behavior, indicating the “birth of agency.” It was proved that.
Research on infants provides the first quantified observations of the ’emergence’ of agency and purpose in humans.
Living things act with purpose. But where does purpose come from? How do humans understand their relationship to the world and recognize their ability to make a difference? The fundamental question of has perplexed some of history’s greatest minds, including Sir Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin, Erwin Schrödinger, and Niels Bohr.
A new study from Florida Atlantic University uses an unusual and largely untapped source of information: human babies to uncover groundbreaking insights into the origins of agency. Because goal-directed behavior emerges in the first months of human life, the FAU research team experimented with young children to understand how spontaneous movements transform into purposeful behavior. used as a field.
In this study, infants began the experiment as isolated observers. However, when researchers tied one of the infant’s legs to a baby mobile attached to a crib, they found that the infant could move the mobile. Like lightning in a bottle, researchers used state-of-the-art motion capture technology to measure infant and mobile movements in 3D space to capture this moment of realization. We have revealed the dynamic and coordinating features that characterize “.
![Birth of an agency](https://scitechdaily.com/images/Birth-of-Agency-777x481.jpg 777w,https://scitechdaily.com/images/Birth-of-Agency-400x248.jpg 400w,https://scitechdaily.com/images/Birth-of-Agency-768x476.jpg 768w,https://scitechdaily.com/images/Birth-of-Agency.jpg 1014w)
If your toddler’s foot is tethered to a cell phone, the phone will move every time they move their foot. Positive feedback amplifies and emphasizes the causal relationship between infant and mobile movements.Credit: Florida Atlantic University
Recent research results are Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, provides a solution to this age-old conundrum. Analysis of experiments with human infants and dynamical modeling suggest that agency emerges from the bonded relationship between the organism (baby) and the environment (mobile object). But how exactly does this happen?
If your toddler’s foot is tethered to a cell phone, the phone will move every time they move their foot. It was believed that the more the mobile moved, the more the infant would be stimulated to move and the more mobile movement would be produced.
“Positive feedback amplifies and highlights the causal relationship between infants and mobile movements,” said J.A. Scott, senior author of the Center for Complex Systems and Brain Science and Distinguished Scholar at Glenwood and Martha Creech.・Dr. Kelso said. in FAU’s Charles E. Schmidt College of Science. “At some critical coordination level, the infant recognizes his causal relationships and moves from spontaneous to intentional action. You can.”
![3D reconstruction and representation of infant joint positions.](https://scitechdaily.com/images/3D-Reconstruction-and-Representation-of-the-Positions-of-the-Infants-Joints-777x528.jpg 777w,https://scitechdaily.com/images/3D-Reconstruction-and-Representation-of-the-Positions-of-the-Infants-Joints-400x272.jpg 400w,https://scitechdaily.com/images/3D-Reconstruction-and-Representation-of-the-Positions-of-the-Infants-Joints-768x522.jpg 768w,https://scitechdaily.com/images/3D-Reconstruction-and-Representation-of-the-Positions-of-the-Infants-Joints.jpg 1020w)
3D reconstruction/representation of infant joint positions (red = left side, green = right side, yellow/orange = center, mobile position = blue). The image on the right shows small silver spheres placed on various joints of the baby’s skin. A special camera sends out infrared light, which is reflected off the sphere and back to the camera. The system then obtains reflected infrared information from all cameras to determine the exact location of each sphere.Credit: Florida Atlantic University
Dr. Aliza Sloan, lead author and postdoctoral fellow in the FAU Center for Complex Systems Brain Science, developed the quantitative “Aha!” A detector that searches for sudden increases in infant movement velocity associated with infant sudden discoveries.
Sloan’s technique demonstrated that the “birth” of subjectivity can be quantified as a phase transition of “Eureka-like” pattern changes within a dynamic system spanning the baby, brain, and environment. Once the infant discovers a functional connection with the cell phone, the system switches from a state of low correlation to a state in which movements of both the cell phone and the tethered limb are highly coordinated.
Although the basic design of this experiment has been used in developmental research since the late 1960s, related research has traditionally focused solely on infant activity and treated infant and environment as separate entities. In 50 years of formal experimentation with baby mobiles, the FAU study provided the first direct measurement of mobile movement and quantified observations of the emergence of human agency using coordination analysis.
The new approach used in this study constitutes institutions as emergent properties resulting from the functional coupling of organisms and environments. The researchers looked at the interactions between babies and mobile bodies through the eyes of coordination dynamics, Kelso et al.’s theory of how complex organisms are coordinated (from cells to societies) and how function and order emerge. We delved deeply into the effects.
If your toddler’s foot is tethered to a cell phone, the phone will move every time they move their foot. Positive feedback amplifies and emphasizes the causal relationship between infant and mobile movements. At a critical level of coordination, infants become aware of their causal relationships and move from voluntary to intentional behavior. This is ah! This moment is characterized by a sudden increase in the speed of movement of the infant.Credit: Florida Atlantic University
Although it was expected that infants would discover control of the cell phone through coordinated movements with the cell phone, the pattern of infant pausing was significant.
“Our findings show that it’s not just the infant’s active movements that are important,” said co-author Nancy Jones, Ph.D., professor in the FAU Department of Psychology and director of the FAU WAVES Lab. Ta.
A fully coordinated analysis of the baby’s movements, mobile movements, and their interactions reveals that the emergence of agency is an intermittent self-organizing process, with meaning in both movement and stillness.
“The babies in our study revealed something very profound: there is activity in doing nothing, and there is doing nothing in activity. It provides meaningful information to young children as they explore their place within it,” Kelso said. “The coordinated dynamics of movement and stillness jointly constitute an integration of consciousness in which the baby can make things happen in the world. Deliberately.”
The FAU study also revealed that infants navigate functional connectivity with mobile in different ways. Distinct clusters in the timing and extent of bursts of infant activity are detected, suggesting that behavioral phenotypes (observable features) of agentic discovery exist and that dynamics provide a means to identify them. . This new phenotyping method may aid in preventive care and early treatment of at-risk infants.
References: Aliza T. Sloan, Nancy Aaron Jones, and JA Scott Kelso, “The Meaning of Movement and Stillness: Characteristics of Coordination Dynamics Reveal Infant Agency,” September 18, 2023. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2306732120
This research was supported by the FAU Foundation and the National Institute of Mental Health (MH-080838). National Institutes of Health.