The mobile paradigm is one of the most well-known paradigms in developmental psychology and infant research (for review, see Sen & Gredebäck, 2021). Studies using this paradigm report that infants as young as 3 months of age can detect and learn the contingency between their kicking and the movement of a mobile tied to their leg with a ribbon (Rovee & Rovee, 1969;Rovee-Collier et al., 1978). Results also indicate that young infants can remember the visual characteristics of their environment after days and even weeks if they are reminded with the training mobile (Rovee & Fagen, 1976;Rovee-Collier et al., 1980;Sullivan et al., 1979). With this method, researchers have made influential contributions to several fields, including operant conditioning (Rovee & Rovee, 1969), perceptual learning (Butler & Rovee-Collier, 1989), and eye-witness memory (Rovee-Collier et al., 1993).On a more theoretical level, the mobile paradigm has been instrumental in the transition from a reflexdriven view of infant behavior to a larger focus on infants as intentional, internally motivated beings who learn, process, and remember information over time (Hayne & Lipsitt, 2015). As of March 2021, the 20 mostcited papers using the paradigm have 4315 citations in Google Scholar (i.e., cumulative number of citations that following articles received, Borovsky & Rovee-

In this review article, we describe the mobile paradigm, a method used for more than 50 years to assess how infants learn and remember sensorimotor contingencies. The literature on the mobile paradigm demonstrates that infants below 6 months of age can remember the learning environment weeks after when reminded periodically and integrate temporally distributed information across modalities. The latter ability is only possible if events occur within a temporal window of a few days, and the width of this required window changes as a function of age. A major critique of these conclusions is that the majority of this literature has neglected the embodied experience, such that motor behavior was considered an equivalent developmental substitute for verbal behavior. Over recent years, simulation and empirical work have highlighted the sensorimotor aspect and opened up a discussion for possible learning mechanisms and variability in motor preferences of young infants. In line with this recent direction, we present a new embodied account on the mobile paradigm which argues that learning sensorimotor contingencies is a core feature of development forming the basis for active exploration of the world and body. In addition to better explaining recent findings, this new framework aims to replace the dis-embodied approach to the mobile paradigm with a new understanding that focuses on variance and representations grounded in sensorimotor experience. Finally, we discuss a potential role for the dorsal stream which might be responsible for guiding action according to visual information, while infants learn sensorimotor contingencies in the mobile paradigm.

Most research with the mobile paradigm has the underlying assumption that young infants can selectively move the limb causing the contingent feedback from the mobile while avoiding irrelevant motor responses. Contrary to this long‐held belief, others have argued that such differentiation ability is not fully developed early in life. In the current study, we revisited the traditional mobile paradigm with a contemporary research approach (using high‐precision motion capture techniques, a yoked‐control design, and a large sample size) to investigate whether response differentiation ability emerges before 5 months of age. The data collected from 76 infants (aged between 115 and 159 days) revealed that infants can learn sensorimotor contingencies by increasing the movement of the connected leg relative to their baseline level. However, they did not differentially increase the movement of the leg causing an effect in the environment compared with that of other limbs. Our results illustrate that response differentiation ability emerges later than previously suggested.

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