Abstract
This study observed infants’ tool use when eating rice by placing it on a spoon, and analyzed their regulation of the environment, based on ecological psychology. For 1 year, two infants aged 1–2 years were observed during meals at a nursery school. For this study, placing food on a spoon was defined as both a food task and a spoon task. As a result, the infants could divide food into small pieces, but they could not gather up granular food. The infants’ prospectivity within one spoon movement from the dish to the mouth was estimated. The front or left side of the dish was presumed to be the easy-to-use side. The most advanced scooping manipulation, which Connolly & Dalgleish (1989) called the “wrist rotation strategy”, was interpreted as increasing the contact area between the spoon and food on the surface of the dish to achieve the goal of placing the food on the spoon.
