What is one of the earliest developmental tasks you can help encourage in infants?

Encouraging infants to locate and follow people and objects with their eyes is vital for their visual development and cognitive growth. This task lays the foundation for later skills such as tracking moving objects, understanding spatial relationships, and engaging with people around them. Eye tracking is one of the earliest forms of interaction that helps infants connect with their environment and the caregivers in it, fostering social and communicative skills.

When infants follow objects or people visually, they begin to recognize familiar faces and start to differentiate between various stimuli in their surroundings. This visual tracking is also correlated with further development stages, such as reaching for objects, which is critical for motor skill development. As such, it represents a fundamental building block for more complex skills that will develop as they grow.

The other choices do not align as closely with early developmental tasks: playing independently is a skill that develops later as infants gain confidence, while interacting primarily with adults is less about an early developmental task and more about social preferences, and mastering complex cognitive skills occurs significantly later in development. Thus, focusing on eye tracking is essential at this stage.