THEMATIC COLLECTION: COMMENTARIES Infant Cortical Development and the Prospective Control of Saccadic Eye Movements

Babies, like everyone else in this world, need to learn how to coordinate their actions with events that are not under their direct control. Response latency is an obstacle in this process, and the primary goal of sensorimotor development is to overcome it through the application of foresight (Piaget, 1937/1954). Visual exploration is where the infant first seriously confronts the problem of response latency. The infant moves his or her eye to inspect something in the periphery, only to find that when his or her eye has rotated to its final position, the object of interest may no longer be there. To solve this problem, he or she must learn to make good guesses about the future and be ready to act when, or even before, the future arrives. In other words, the baby will need to organize his or her behavior in a prospective manner. Rather than simply reacting to what happens to him or her, the baby needs to start thinking ahead. Eventually, the baby will be guided by plans, goals, anticipatory schemata, expectations, and memories of the future. By developing prospective sensorimotor control, not only will the baby become the master of his or her domain, he or she will be building a foundation INFANCY, 2(2), 197–211 Copyright © 2001, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc.