Citation

Köster M, Kayhan E, Langeloh M, Hoehl S. Perspect. Psychol. Sci. 2020; ePub(ePub): ePub.

Affiliation

Department of Developmental and Educational Psychology, Faculty of Psychology, University of Vienna.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2020, Association for Psychological Science, Publisher John Wiley and Sons)

DOI

10.1177/1745691619895071

PMID

32167407

Abstract

For human infants, the first years after birth are a period of intense exploration-getting to understand their own competencies in interaction with a complex physical and social environment. In contemporary neuroscience, the predictive-processing framework has been proposed as a general working principle of the human brain, the optimization of predictions about the consequences of one's own actions, and sensory inputs from the environment. However, the predictive-processing framework has rarely been applied to infancy research. We argue that a predictive-processing framework may provide a unifying perspective on several phenomena of infant development and learning that may seem unrelated at first sight. These phenomena include statistical learning principles, infants' motor and proprioceptive learning, and infants' basic understanding of their physical and social environment. We discuss how a predictive-processing perspective can advance the understanding of infants' early learning processes in theory, research, and application.

Language: en

Keywords

cognition; infant development; neuroscience; perception; social cognition