The Potter's Wheel: Craft Specialization and Technical Competence

The book comprises two ethnoarchaeological studies whose aim is the construction of a reference knowledge for interpreting archaeological data, according to the principles of verification against empirical data. The first study deals with the concept of craft specialization. This is a commonly encountered concept since it describes the emergence of complex societies. The question is to find material critria significant of pottery specialization that are receivable from an epistemological point of view. With this purpose in mind, the authors conducted a study on apprenticeship in wheel throwing technique. Perceptual motor tests, potters' gestures and experimental products are studied. They show that the apprenticeship in throwing technique is necessarily long and difficult taking into account the motor activities which have to be developed. Based on this, the authors propose to associate the material fact "throwing technique" to the attribute "craft specialization". The second study is the construction of a techno-morphological taxonomy to evaluate the throwing difficulties of pre- and protohistoric ceramic vessels. The techno-morphological taxonomy is constructed on the basis of Indian potter's classification and explanations. The validity of the oral data is assessed by analysing an experimental production in terms of measures, manufacturing time, and thinning and shaping gestures. Then, the transcultural value of the taxinomy is discussed on the basis of an investigation with French potters

Assessing the Impact of Movement Consequences on the Development of Early Reaching in Infancy

Prior research on infant reaching has shown that providing infants with repeated opportunities to reach for objects aids the emergence and progression of reaching behavior. This study investigated the effect of movement consequences on the process of learning to reach in pre-reaching infants. Thirty-five infants aged 2.9 months at the onset of the study were randomly assigned to 1 of 3 groups. Two groups received a 14-day intervention to distinct reaching tasks: (1) in a contingent group, a toy target moved and sounded upon contact only, and (2) in a continuous group, the toy moved and sounded continuously, independent of hand-toy contact. A third control group did not receive any intervention; this group’s performance was assessed only on 2 days at a 15-day interval. Results revealed that infants in the contingent group made the most progress over time compared to the two other groups. Infants in this group made significantly more overall contacts with the sounding/moving toy, and they increased their rate of visually attended target contacts relative to non-visually attended target contacts compared to the continuous and control groups. Infants in the continuous group did not differ from the control group on the number of hand-toy contacts nor did they show a change in visually attended target versus non-visually attended target contacts ratio over time. However, they did show an increase in movement speed, presumably in an attempt to attain the moving toy. These findings highlight the importance of contingent movement consequences as a critical reinforcer for the selection of action and motor learning in early development. Through repeated opportunities to explore movement consequences, infants discover and select movements that are most successful to the task-at-hand. This study further demonstrates that distinct sensory-motor experiences can have a significant impact on developmental trajectories and can influence the skills young infants will discover through their interactions with their surroundings

Assessing the Impact of Movement Consequences on the Development of Early Reaching in Infancy

Prior research on infant reaching has shown that providing infants with repeated opportunities to reach for objects aids the emergence and progression of reaching behavior. This study investigated the effect of movement consequences on the process of learning to reach in pre-reaching infants. Thirty-five infants aged 2.9 months at the onset of the study were randomly assigned to 1 of 3 groups. Two groups received a 14-day intervention to distinct reaching tasks: (1) in a contingent group, a toy target moved and sounded upon contact only, and (2) in a continuous group, the toy moved and sounded continuously, independent of hand-toy contact. A third control group did not receive any intervention; this group’s performance was assessed only on 2 days at a 15-day interval. Results revealed that infants in the contingent group made the most progress over time compared to the two other groups. Infants in this group made significantly more overall contacts with the sounding/moving toy, and they increased their rate of visually attended target contacts relative to non-visually attended target contacts compared to the continuous and control groups. Infants in the continuous group did not differ from the control group on the number of hand-toy contacts nor did they show a change in visually attended target versus non-visually attended target contacts ratio over time. However, they did show an increase in movement speed, presumably in an attempt to attain the moving toy. These findings highlight the importance of contingent movement consequences as a critical reinforcer for the selection of action and motor learning in early development. Through repeated opportunities to explore movement consequences, infants discover and select movements that are most successful to the task-at-hand. This study further demonstrates that distinct sensory-motor experiences can have a significant impact on developmental trajectories and can influence the skills young infants will discover through their interactions with their surroundings

Brain reorganization as a function of walking experience in 12-month-old infants: implications for the development of manual laterality

Hand preference in infancy is marked by many developmental shifts in hand use and arm coupling as infants reach for and manipulate objects. Research has linked these early shifts in hand use to the emergence of fundamental postural–locomotor milestones. Specifically, it was found that bimanual reaching declines when infants learn to sit; increases if infants begin to scoot in a sitting posture; declines when infants begin to crawl on hands and knees; and increases again when infants start walking upright. Why such pattern fluctuations during periods of postural–locomotor learning? One proposed hypothesis is that arm use practiced for the specific purpose of controlling posture and achieving locomotion transfers to reaching via brain functional reorganization. There has been scientific support for functional cortical reorganization and change in neural connectivity in response to motor practice in adults and animals, and as a function of crawling experience in human infants. In this research, we examined whether changes in neural connectivity also occurred as infants coupled their arms when learning to walk and whether such coupling mapped onto reaching laterality. Electroencephalogram (EEG) coherence data were collected from 43 12-month-old infants with varied levels of walking experience. EEG was recorded during quiet, attentive baseline. Walking proficiency was laboratory assessed and reaching responses were captured using small toys presented at mid-line while infants were sitting. Results revealed greater EEG coherence at homologous prefrontal/central scalp locations for the novice walkers compared to the prewalkers or more experienced walkers. In addition, reaching laterality was low in prewalkers and early walkers but high in experienced walkers. These results are consistent with the interpretation that arm coupling practiced during early walking transferred to reaching via brain functional reorganization, leading to the observed developmental changes in manual laterality

Changes in Posture and Interactive Behaviors as Infants Progress From Sitting to Walking: A Longitudinal Study

This longitudinal study assessed how infants and mothers used different postures and modulated their interactions with their surroundings as the infants progressed from sitting to walking. Thirteen infants and their mothers were observed biweekly throughout this developmental period during 10 min laboratory free-play sessions. For every session, we tracked the range of postures mothers and infants produced (e.g., sitting, kneeling, and standing), we assessed the type of interactions they naturally engaged in (no interactions, passive involvement, fine motor manipulation, or gross motor activity), and documented all target transitions. During the crawling transition period, when infants used sitting postures, they engaged mainly in fine motor manipulations of targets and often maintained their activity on the same target. As infants became mobile, their rate of fine motor manipulation declined during sitting but increased while kneeling/squatting. During the walking transition, their interactions with targets became more passive, particularly when sitting and standing, but they also engaged in greater gross motor activity while continuing to use squatting/kneeling postures for fine motor manipulations. The walking period was also marked by an increase in target changes and more frequent posture changes during object interactions. Throughout this developmental period, mothers produced mainly no or passive activity during sitting, kneeling/squatting, and standing. As expected, during this developmental span, infants used their body in increasingly varied ways to explore and interact with their environment, but more importantly, progression in posture variations significantly altered how infants manually interacted with their surrounding world

Mapping the feel of the arm with the sight of the object: on the embodied origins of infant reaching

For decades, the emergence and progression of infant reaching was assumed to be largely under the control of vision. More recently, however, the guiding role of vision in the emergence of reaching has been downplayed. Studies found that young infants can reach in the dark without seeing their hand and that corrections in infants\u27 initial hand trajectories are not the result of visual guidance of the hand, but rather the product of poor movement speed calibration to the goal. As a result, it has been proposed that learning to reach is an embodied process requiring infants to explore proprioceptively different movement solutions, before they can accurately map their actions onto the intended goal. Such an account, however, could still assume a preponderant (or prospective) role of vision, where the movement is being monitored with the scope of approximating a future goal-location defined visually. At reach onset, it is unknown if infants map their action onto their vision, vision onto their action, or both. To examine how infants learn to map the feel of their hand with the sight of the object, we tracked the object-directed looking behavior (via eye-tracking) of three infants followed weekly over an 11-week period throughout the transition to reaching. We also examined where they contacted the object. We find that with some objects, infants do not learn to align their reach to where they look, but rather learn to align their look to where they reach. We propose that the emergence of reaching is the product of a deeply embodied process, in which infants first learn how to direct their movement in space using proprioceptive and haptic feedback from self-produced movement contingencies with the environment. As they do so, they learn to map visual attention onto these bodily centered experiences, not the reverse. We suggest that this early visuo-motor mapping is critical for the formation of visually-elicited, prospective movement control

A Naturalistic Observation of Spontaneous Touches to the Body and Environment in the First 2 Months of Life

Self-generated touches to the body or supporting surface are considered important contributors to the emergence of an early sense of the body and self in infancy. Both are critical for the formation of later goal-directed actions. Very few studies have examined in detail the development of these early spontaneous touches during the first months of life. In this study, we followed weekly four infants in two naturalistic 5-min sessions (baseline and toys-in-view) as they laid alert in supine from the age of 3 weeks until they acquired head control. We found that throughout the 2 months of observation, infants engaged in a high rate of touch and spent about 50% of the time moving their hands from one touch location to the next. On most sessions, they produced up to 200 body/surface contacts and touched as many as 18 different areas (mainly upper body and floor) both hands combined. When we did not consider the specific areas touched, the rates of touches were higher to the body than to the floor, but the duration of contacts and the most touched areas were higher for the supporting surface than for the body. Until the age of 9 weeks, we found no consistent differences in the rate of touch between head and trunk. Infants also did not display significant differences in their rate of touch between right and left hand or between conditions. However, we discovered that in the earlier weeks, infants engaged more often in what we called “complex touches.” Complex touches were touches performed across several body/floor areas in one continuous bout while the hand maintained contact with the body or floor. Single touches, in contrast, corresponded to one touch to one single body or floor area at a time. We suggest that infants are active explorers of their own body and peripersonal space from day 1 and that these early self-generated and deeply embodied sensorimotor experiences form the critical foundation from which future behaviors develop

Itinerários do "estado da arte da educação ambiental superior na Argentina" (Earte-Ar): caminhos, resultados preliminares e desafios

Este artículo tiene un objetivo doble: describe el itinerario recorrido por el grupo argentino (EArte Ar) del Estado del Arte de la Educación Ambiental en América Latina y el Caribe (Arte-ALyC), y presenta los resultados preliminares de su estudio sobre las tesis de maestría y doctorado asociadas al citado campo de conocimiento en el país. Tras enmarcar el estudio en la discusión más amplia alrededor de la educación ambiental, la sección metodológica describe y justifica cada uno de los pasos del proceso iterativo a través del cual se construyeron criterios e instrumentos de recolección y selección de las 52 tesis que constituyen el universo del capítulo argentino de este estudio más amplio. En materia de hallazgos, se muestran dos núcleos de información. El primero, refiere a los repositorios de tesis de posgrado, que en Argentina exhiben un incipiente proceso de digitalización y una alta disparidad de situaciones. El segundo núcleo refiere al universo de tesis de posgrado que abordan la relación procesos educativos y ambiente. Aquí se describe: 1) el mayor peso cuantitativo de tesis pertenecientes a programas de maestría sobre las de doctorado; 2) la predominancia de tesis producidas desde las áreas de las ciencias naturales y biológicas, y en menor medida, desde las ciencias sociales y humanidades; 3) y, por último, el año 2014 como el más fértil en materia de producción de las tesis que interesan al estudio. Aunque se describen algunos temas específicos de la relación procesos educativos y ambiente, el artículo plantea que uno de los desafíos para el mediano plazo es la sistematización rigurosa y el análisis del tipo de temáticas estudiadas en las tesis seleccionadas para el estudio.he present article deals with a double objective. First, we intend to describe the itinerary covered by the Argentine group (EArte-Ar) of the State of the Art of Higher Environmental Education in Latin America and the Caribbean (Arte-ALyC). Secondly, we present the preliminary results of its study on the master’s and doctoral theses associated with the field, as mentioned earlier, of knowledge in the country. After framing the analysisin a broader discussion of environmental education, the methodological section describes and justifies each of the steps of the iterative process, detailing the criteria and instruments employed for collecting and selecting the 52 theses that constitute the final universe of theses built by the Argentinian group. In terms of findings, two nuclei of information are exhibited. The first refers to postgraduate thesis repositories, which indicate an incipient digitization process and a high disparity of situations in Argentina. The second moment refers to the universe of doctoral theses that address the relationship between educational methods and the environment. The second finding describes a 1) greater quantitative weight of theses that belongs to masters’ programs over doctoral ones; 2) the predominance of theses produced from the areas of natural and biological sciences, and to a lesser extent, from the social sciences and humanities; 3) and, finally, 2014 is shown as the most fertile year in terms of production of theses. Although some specific issues related to educational processes and the environment are described, this article states that one of the challenges for the medium term is the rigorous systematization and analysis of the type of issues studied in the theses selected for the study.Este artigo tem um duplo objetivo: descreve o itinerário percorrido pelo grupo argentino (EArte-Ar) do Estado da Arte da Educação Ambiental na América Latina e Caribe (Arte-ALyC) e apresenta os resultados preliminares de seu estudo a partir de dissertações e teses associadas à referida área de conhecimento no país. Após enquadrar o estudo na discussão mais ampla em torno da pesquisa em educação ambiental, a seção metodológica descreve e justifica cada uma das etapas do processo iterativo por meio do qual foram construídos critérios e instrumentos de coleta e seleção das 52 produções acadêmicas que constituem o universo documental deste estudo maior. Em termos de resultados, é possível evidenciar dois núcleos de informação. A primeira refere-se aos repositórios de dissertações e teses, que na Argentina apresentam um processo de digitalização incipiente e uma grande disparidade de situações. O segundo núcleo refere-se ao universo das dissertações e teses que abordam a relação entre os processos educativos e o meio ambiente. Aqui se descreve: 1) o maior peso quantitativo das dissertações de mestrado sobre as teses de doutorado; 2) a predominância de teses produzidas nas áreas das ciências naturais e biológicas e, em menor grau, das ciências sociais e humanas; 3) e, por fim, o ano de 2014 como o mais fértil em termos de produção das teses que interessam ao estudo. Embora sejam descritas algumas questões específicas relacionadas aos processos educacionais e ao meio ambiente, o artigo afirma que um dos desafios para o médio prazo é a rigorosa sistematização e análise do tipo de questões estudadas nas teses selecionadas para o estudo.Fil: Franco, Andrea Daniela. Universidad Nacional de la Patagonia "San Juan Bosco"; Argentina. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas; ArgentinaFil: de la Vega Avila Tulian, Candela. Universidad Nacional de Córdoba; Argentina. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas; ArgentinaFil: Truchet, Daniela María. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - Mar del Plata. Instituto de Investigaciones Marinas y Costeras. Universidad Nacional de Mar del Plata. Facultad de Ciencias Exactas y Naturales. Instituto de Investigaciones Marinas y Costeras; ArgentinaFil: Pereyra, Daniel Augusto. Universidad Nacional de la Patagonia "San Juan Bosco"; ArgentinaFil: Maldonado, José Antonio. Universidad Nacional de Santiago del Estero; Argentina. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet Noa Sur. Instituto de Estudios para el Desarrollo Social. - Universidad Nacional de Santiago del Estero. Facultad de Humanidades Ciencias Sociales y de la Salud. Instituto de Estudios para el Desarrollo Social; ArgentinaFil: Foradori, María Laura. Universidad Nacional de Villa María; Argentina. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas; ArgentinaFil: Ithuralde, Raúl Esteban. Universidad Nacional de Santiago del Estero; Argentina. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas; ArgentinaFil: Alvino, Sandra Andrea. Universidad Nacional de Tres de Febrero; ArgentinaFil: Corbetta, Silvina Andrea. Universidad Nacional de Santiago del Estero; Argentina. Universidad Nacional de Hurlingham; Argentin