10/16/25 Justine Hoch: The development of exploratory behavior
CCN brown bag
Justine Hoch, PhD
Assistant Professor of Psychology and Human Development
Date: Thursday, October 16, 2025
Time: 12:10- 1:00pm
Location: 316 Wilson Hall
The development of exploratory behavior
The onset of independent locomotion is a particularly important milestone in the development of exploratory behavior. Once mobile, human infants gain unprecedented access to the larger world and can decide for themselves where to go and what to see and do. As a result, new locomotor skills set in motion cascades of development in numerous psychological domains. Given these benefits, caregivers and clinicians may wish to encourage locomotion. But unlike cognitive, linguistic, and social skills, where gaining the requisite experience largely relies on others, developing motor skills requires infants to generate their own input for learning. In this talk, I characterize factors that influence infants’ spontaneous locomotion and discuss features of locomotor development that may promote skill learning and generalization.