How an infant investigates a banana [left and right]

The infant’s mother has cut a banana in half, and then sliced one of the halves lengthwise. She then places the two slices flat-side down on the tray in front of her infant.

Me and banana 🍌 #shorts #shortvideo #babyalex https://t.co/TeWxUWaJpT via @YouTube

— Bill Benzon, BAM! Bootstrapping Artificial Minds (@bbenzon) June 19, 2024

Three things interest me about what the infant does:

1. While it is able to grab a banana slice and move it around on the tray, it can’t get its fingers around it in order to pick it up. So, mother turns one piece over and places it back on the tray.
   
2. Now the infant manages to grab that piece with its right hand. Notice, though, when it finally manages to pick it up, it’s not looking at its hand. It appears to be looking at mama. That action is guided entirely by touch and movement.
   
3. After it has brought the banana to its mouth and managed to at least taste it a bit, what does it do? After it visually inspects the banana a bit, it moves its left had toward the banana and touches the tip with its left index finger.

That last item is what interests me most. I believe that it isn’t until about six months that infants are able to coordinate the right and left halves of their body in the same space. Before that time, the left and right hands, in effect, don’t “know” about one another. So, when the infant touches the banana with its left hand, it’s making sure that the banana is at the same position in space for both hands. 

NOTE: Remember that the two halves of the body are controlled by the opposite halves of the brain. The right half of the body is controlled by the left half of the brain, and vice versa. While the two halves of the brain certainly communicate with one another through the corpus callosum, a bundle of the 200-300 million neurons, they are not a continuous field. They’ve got to ‘learn’ about one another.