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Telling apart motor noise from exploratory behaviour, in early development

Infant’s minutes long babbling bouts or energetic reaching for or mouthing of whatever they can get their hands on gives very much the impression of active exploration, a building block for early learning. But how can we tell active exploration from the activity of an immature motor system, attempting but failing to achieve goal directed behaviour? I will focus here on evidence that infants actively increase motor activity and variability when faced with opportunities to gather new information. I will discuss mechanisms generating movement variability, and suggests that, in the various forms it takes, from deliberate hypothesis testing to increasing environmental variability, it could be exploited for learning. However, understanding how infant exploratory behavior contributes to learning will require more in-depth investigations of both the nature of and the contextual modulation of behavioural variability.