Living things behave with purpose. But where does the purpose come from? How do humans understand their relationship with the world, and how do they realize their ability to change the world? These fundamental questions about "agency" - purposeful action - have perplexed some of history's greatest thinkers, including Sir Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin, Erwin Schrödinger and Niels Bohr.
New research from Florida Atlantic University uses the unusual and untapped source of human infants to reveal groundbreaking insights into the origins of agents. Since goal-directed action emerges in the first months of human life, the University of Florida research team used infants as a testing ground to understand how spontaneous movements turn into purposeful actions.
In the study, infants were uninvolved observers at the beginning of the experiment. However, when researchers tied one foot of the infants to an infant mobile device in their crib, the babies found they could make the mobile device move. To capture this lightning-in-a-bottle moment of realization, researchers used state-of-the-art motion capture technology to measure the movement of the baby and mobile device through three-dimensional space, uncovering the dynamic and coordinated characteristics that mark the "birth of agency."
Research recently published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences provides a solution to this age-old conundrum. Analysis and dynamic modeling of experiments with human infants show that the sense of agency arises from the coupling relationship between the organism (infant) and the environment (movement). But how exactly does this happen?
When an infant's feet are tethered to a mobility device, each movement of the foot causes the mobility device to move. It is thought that the more the mobile unit moves, the more it stimulates the baby to move, thus producing more movement.
"Positive feedback amplifies and highlights the cause-and-effect relationships between infants and mobile device movements," said J.A. Scott Kelso, Ph.D., the study's senior author and the Glenwood and Martha Creech Distinguished Science Scholar in the Center for Complex Systems and Brain Sciences in FAU's Charles E. Schmidt College of Science. "At a certain critical level of coordination, infants recognize their own causal abilities and transition from spontaneous to intentional behavior. This 'aha!' moment is marked by a sudden increase in the infant's rate of movement."
Aliza Sloan, Ph.D., first author of the paper and a postdoctoral research scientist at the University of Florida Center for Complex Systems and Brain Sciences, developed a quantitative "aha!" detector to search for sudden increases in infant movement rates associated with sudden infant death.
Sloan's technique demonstrates that the "birth" of agency can be quantified as a "Eureka-like," pattern-changing phase transition in a dynamic system that spans the infant, brain, and environment. As the infant finds itself functionally connected to the mobile device, the system switches from a less connected state to a state in which the movements of both the mobile device and the tethered limb are highly coordinated.
Although the basic design of this experiment has been used in developmental research since the late 1960s, related research has traditionally focused only on infants' activities, treating infants and the environment as separate entities. In 50 years of formal infant mobility experiments, FAU's research is the first to directly measure the motion of a mobile device and to use coordination analysis to quantitatively observe the emergence of human agency.
The new approach used in this study defines agency as an emergent property of functional coupling of organisms to their environment. Kelso and his colleagues proposed the theory of "Coordination Dynamics" to study how complex organisms (from cells to societies) coordinate and how function and order arise.
Although we expected that infants would discover their own control over the mobile device through coordinated movements with the mobile device, the infants' pausing patterns were alarming.
"Our findings suggest that it's not just the baby's active movements that matter," said co-author Nancy Jones, Ph.D., professor in the Department of Psychology at UF and director of the UF Wave Lab.
Through a complete coordination analysis of infants' movement, locomotion, and interactions between them, we find that the emergence of agency is a point-like self-organizing process that finds meaning in both movement and stillness.
"The babies in our study revealed something very profound: action within inaction, and inaction within action. Both provide meaningful information for infants' exploration of the world and their place in it," Kelso said. "The harmonious dynamics of movement and stillness together constitute the unity of infant consciousness - they can create miracles in the world. Do it intentionally."
The University of Virginia study also shows that infants functionally couple with mobile devices in different ways. The study found distinct clusters in the timing and extent of bursts of activity in infants, suggesting the existence of behavioral phenotypes (observable characteristics) discovered by agents, and dynamics providing a way to identify these phenotypes. This novel phenotypic approach may aid in preventive care and early treatment of high-risk infants.