This paper reviews recent work on the development of the perceptual
information-seeking function of the hand in relation to its motor-executive
function. The general argument is that from five to six months of age, i.e. when the
movements of the hand begin to be systematically controlled by vision, manual haptic
competences are consistently under-used and are obscured by a strong visual
dominance. Although intramodal haptic discrimination and visual-tactual cross modal
transfer take place very early in infancy, infants and children make poor use of
their manual perceptual abilities. Consequently, their observed performance on
bimodal visual-haptic tasks and in cross modal tasks do not fully support Gibson's
hypothesis of amodal processing of perceptual information.
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