Do infants have agency? – The importance of control for the study of early agency

Questions about infants’ development of agency have been a topic of great interest for developmental psychology for many years. The central claim of our review is that agentic control is a necessary feature of minimal agency. We review influential experimental paradigms on infants’ agency which have predominantly focused on infants’ detection of multi-sensory contingencies (e.g., the mobile paradigm). We argue that these paradigms show infants’ ability to integrate multi-sensory information and learn reinforced movements, but do not test whether infants have agentic control over these movements. We further argue that, without a measure of agentic control, it cannot be conclusively shown whether the movements produced by infants reflect mere automatic responses or are indeed evidence of infants’controlled actions. Finally, based on the criterion of agentic control, we derive concrete experimental suggestions for a test of infants’ minimal agency.