Meaningful movements in early childhood: The cognitive and developmental bases of dance, gesture, and musical actions

From the first year of life, children represent others’ actions as goal-directed, and can reason about the causes and motivations behind others’ observable movements. While the majority of developmental literature has focused on early instrumental goals (e.g., interacting with objects), less attention has been devoted to characterizing children’s production and reasoning about non-instrumental movements and non-object-directed goals. However, these kinds of actions have the potential to play a large role in young children’s lives in the form of everyday movements such as dance and gesture. In this dissertation, I explore the extent to which children readily produce and comprehend meaningful movements with a rich spectrum of abstract goals. Specifically, I focus on dance-like movement to music, movements that produce musical sounds, and communicative movements that accompany speech (gestures). In Chapter 1, I ask whether infants readily demonstrate dance-like movement to music at home and whether early development of these behaviors has been underestimated by in-lab studies. I show that children produce dance-like behavior earlier than previously believed, and that infant dance shows developmental change with both maturation and learning. I argue that children’s dance behavior provides a window into early social, cognitive, and motor development. In Chapter 2, I explore children’s reasoning about movements that produce musical sounds. I present evidence that from childhood (6 years of age) onward, rational causal inference plays a role in linking music with agents and movements. I also find evidence of developmental change, such that preschool age children may not engage in causal reasoning about music as older children do. In Chapter 3, I shift to explore the relationship between movement and analogical reasoning. Through both correlational and experimental methods observing children’s gesture production, I suggest that children’s spontaneous gestures provide a wind