Parents support and scaffold more mature behaviors in their infants. Recent research suggests that parent-infant joint visual attention may scaffold the development of sustained attention by extending the duration of an infant's attention to an object. The open question concerns the parent behaviors that occur within joint-attention episodes and…

Skilled behavior requires a balance between previously successful behaviors and new behaviors appropriate to the present context. We describe a dynamic field model for understanding this balance in infant perseverative reaching. The model predictions are tested with regard to the interaction of two aspects of the typical perseverative reaching…