Rapidly learning preconditions for means-ends behaviour using active learning

In [1], we argue that ongoing development may be the result of a set of developmental mechanisms which are in continuous operation during infancy. One such mechanism identified is sensorimotor differentiation. Sensorimotor differentiation allows infants to generate new behaviours by modifying old ones. For example a young infant has a behaviour for waving an object back and forth on a table surface. At some later point, this behaviour becomes differentiated to produce a behaviour for deliberately displacing an object to one side in order to retrieve a visible toy behind it (see Figure I).