Control over one's motor behavior ranks among the infant's greatest achievements. Psychologists who study the acquisition of motor skills in children find it useful to distinguish between gross motor development, that is, motor skills which help children to get around in their environment, such as crawling and walking, and fine motor development, which refers to smaller movement sequences like reaching and grasping. The development of motor skills has implications beyond simply learning how to perform new actions: motor skills can have profound effects on other areas of development. For example, researchers have shown that infants with locomotor experience (experience moving around their environment) were less likely to make errors while searching for hidden objects. The ability to initiate movement around one's environment stimulates the development of spatial encoding abilities, making hidden object tasks easier to solve. Psychology professor Carolyn Rovee-Collier argues that the onset of independent locomotion at around nine months old marks an important transition in memory development. Children who can move about the environment develop an understanding of locations such as here and there. Because infant memory is initially highly dependent on context – that is, the similarity between the situation where information is encoded (stored in memory) and where it is recalled – infants who have experience moving about the environment and who learn to spatially encode information become less dependent on context for successful recall. These examples show that gross motor development has implications beyond the immediately apparent benefits of crawling and walking. Renowned psychologist Jean Piaget argued that the development of reaching and grasping was a key aspect of development because it formed an important link between biological adaptation and intellectual adaptation. Reaching and grasping are voluntary actions under the infant's control, and as such, they open up exciting new possibilities in their ability to explore the environment. An infant who reaches for and grasps an object so as to explore it pushes his development forward as he engages in processes such as adapting his grip to the size and shape of the object. Piaget argued that these early processes drive cognitive development in the first two years of an infant's life. The development of reaching begins early on in life. Newborn infants seated in an upright position will swipe and reach towards an object placed in front of them, a behavior labeled "prereaching." These poorly coordinated behaviors start to decline around two months of age and are replaced by "directed reaching" which begins at about three months of age. At this time reaching becomes more coordinated and efficient, and improves in accuracy. According to research conducted by Clifton et al., the infant's reaching does not depend simply on the guidance of the hand and arm by the visual system but is controlled by proprioception, the sensation of movement and location based on the stimulation arising from bodily sources such as muscle contractions. By about nine months old, infants can adjust their reaching to take into account a moving object. However, nine month-olds are far from expert reachers and a good deal of skill must still develop. Once infants begin reaching they also begin to grasp the objects that are the target of their reaches. The ulnar grasp is seen when infants first engage in directed reaching. The ulnar grasp is a primitive form of grasping in which the infant's fingers close against its palm. The fingers seem to act as a whole, requiring the use of the palm in order to hold an object. Shortly after this accomplishment, when infants can sit upright on their own, they can acquire the ability to transfer objects from hand to hand. Around the end of the first year, infants will have graduated to using the pincer grasp where they use their index finger and thumb in an opposable manner (placing them opposite each other), resulting in a more coordinated and finely tuned grip which allows for the exploration of very small objects or those objects which demand specific actions for their operation, such as the knobs on a stereo system which require turning to the left or right to adjust volume.