Bare fingers, but no obvious influence of prickly Velcro! In the absence of parents' encouragement, it is not clear that sticky mittens provide an advantage to the process of learning to reach

In their critique of our mittens study, Needham et al. (2015. Infant Behavior and Development) describe our findings as surprising. Further; they suggest that babies in our sticky mittens condition may have been discouraged from reaching because, in our study, infants may have touched prickly Velcro with their bare fingers. In this response, we present data analyses that do not support the interpretation that finger contact with our Velcroed toy surfaces was associated with poor reaching performance in our sticky mittens group. We also clarify that our toys were mainly covered with non-prickly Velcro. To explain discrepancies between studies, we restate the original intent of our study and reasons for our methodological modifications. We point to confounds and lack of critical control conditions in the Needham et al. studies, which prevent the making of firm inferences about the effectiveness of the sticky mittens experience on the learning to reach process. We also present additional analyses on our sticky mittens group showing that the increasing rate of finger touch on the toy leads to greater reaching performance while the rate of toy sticking to the mittens does not. We discuss the importance of sensory-motor experience on the development of learning to reach in infancy and conclude that our results are not surprising. (C) 2015 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.