Study: meaning from movement and stillness — signatures of coordination dynamics reveal infant agency
Researchers tracked 3- to 4-month-old infants tethered to a mobile and found distinct movement patterns that suggest babies discover their own ability to cause an effect on the world.
A study published September 26, 2023, in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that infants 3 to 4 months old show distinct movement patterns while learning that they can cause things to happen in their environment, according to the paper and its PubMed listing.
The study, titled "Meaning from movement and stillness: Signatures of coordination dynamics reveal infant agency," was authored by Aliza T. Sloan and Nancy Aaron Jones of Florida Atlantic University's Center for Complex Systems and Brain Sciences, along with J.A. Scott Kelso, who also holds an appointment at Ulster University's Intelligent Systems Research Centre in Northern Ireland.
Researchers tethered infants to a mobile by ribbon and tracked both the infant's and the mobile's movement in three-dimensional space using motion markers, comparing periods when the ribbon connected the baby to the mobile against periods after it was disconnected, per the paper's PMC-hosted full text.
What the movement data showed
The researchers found infants showed heightened foot displacement after the tether was disconnected, which the paper interprets as evidence the infants noticed the loss of their connection to the mobile's movement. The study identifies three distinct behavioral patterns, or phenotypes, among the infants, and reports detecting critical transition points at which individual babies shifted from exploratory movement to goal-directed action.
How the researchers frame the finding
The authors describe the emergence of agency as "a punctuated self-organizing process," writing that "meaning found both in movement and stillness" characterizes how infants discover their own agency, according to the abstract retrieved from PubMed and the full text hosted on PMC.
What it signals
By identifying multiple distinct movement phenotypes rather than one universal pattern, the study suggests infants may discover their own causal power over the world through individually variable paths rather than a single fixed developmental sequence — a framing that treats stillness, not just motion, as informative data about what a baby has and has not yet understood. The exact sample size of infants studied was not specified in the sources retrieved for this account.
US In News compiled this archived account from the published study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and its PubMed/PMC listings. It restores a story originally published on this site in September 2023; figures are as reported at the time.