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Development of fundamental movement skills
Published in Andrea Utley, Motor Control, Learning and Development, 2018
The first locomotive movement seen in infants is rolling, and this occurs between four and 10 months of age. From approximately six months of age, infants begin to move forward in a prone position by some form of creeping or crawling (Figure 15.4). Crawling is very much a pre-walking progression which enables the child to start exploring the environment in a more dynamic manner. In developing a crawling action, infants display a variety of techniques to reach their goal or to explore the environment (van der Meer et al. 2008). For children with movement difficulties this stage may take longer, as the mechanisms controlling temporal and spatial adaptation may take longer to mature (Musselman et al. 2011). Some children with movement difficulties may never gain sufficient muscle strength or postural control to achieve upright locomotion. Adolph et al. (1998) observed that some infants passed through a stage of belly crawling before crawling on hands and knees, while others did not. In a range of studies (see Chapter 14 for more detail) looking at crawling in infants, it has been found that infants have to identify new parameters for control when they start to crawl. Adolph (2000) found that infants new to crawling would crawl ‘over the brink’ on a real visual cliff task. The same infants who were experienced at sitting would not reach to a point that would make them overbalance. This action–perception coupling was discussed in more detail in Chapter 14. The next stage in gaining mobility is termed cruising.
The Developing Brain
Published in David Cohen, How the child's mind develops, 2017
Let’s say you want to find out if adults can spot the difference between triangles and circles projected for nanoseconds. You might tell your subjects to press the red button when they see a triangle and the green button when they see a circle. You can’t begin to do this if your participants can’t understand the words ‘red’, ‘green’, ‘circle’ or ‘triangle’. That’s precisely the situation facing psychologists when they study babies. To overcome the problem, psychologists have devised several non-verbal methods. These include: following the eye movements of babies – studies if a baby is paying attention or concentrating on the people or things it’s looking at;providing babies with ‘unexpected’ events – and seeing how they react;using trick environments like the visual cliff devised by the American psychologists Gibson and Walk (1960). They wanted to know if babies had any depth vision. They built a glass floor, and babies were set to crawl on it. For the first few feet, the glass was right on top of a real floor, so if babies could understand what they were seeing, they must have realised they were crawling on something solid. After some distance, the floor beneath the glass fell away. The babies came to what looked like the edge of a cliff. Did they stop or continue to crawl? Gibson and Walk reasoned that if they stopped, babies had depth perception and some awareness of danger.
Does the Level of Difficulty in Balancing Tasks Affect Haptic Sensitivity Via Light Touch?
Published in Journal of Motor Behavior, 2020
Fernanda Lopes Magre, Thais Delamuta Ayres da Costa, Ana Clara de Souza Paiva, Renato Moraes, Eliane Mauerberg-deCastro
Manipulating the task level of difficulty allowed us to quantify the adaptive demands of the task to the postural system and its ability to exploit resources, such as through haptic touch. The coupling of the haptic task and the postural task are cooperative, and yet sensitive to the task demand. Furthermore, the association between vision deprivation and a raised surface (i.e., the balance beam) created a condition for the postural system’s greater exploitation of the haptic information to reduce postural sway (Mauerberg-deCastro et al., 2010). Such task exploitation also is expected to be significant when individuals vision is occluded (Misiaszek, Forero, Hiob, & Urbanczyk, 2016) or when perturbed by a visual moving environment (Hausbeck et al., 2009). The increased height of the support surface while participants were blindfolded caused a disruptive situation to their control systems, and, likely, their awareness of the surface height introduced an emotional element to the task. Experimental manipulations of surface height have proven to disrupt postural control due to increased awareness of a potential threat or fear of falling. Huffman, Horslen, Carpenter, and Adkin (2009) found that participants who stood on a 3.2-m elevated platform showed a “movement reinvestment” and an awareness of threat, and that while this did not correlate with the efficient control of sway, it caused the body to lean in the opposite direction of the “visual cliff,” which is a natural strategy. A similar study regarding the effects of how emotion can shift attention during postural tasks involved adults with intellectual disability and adults without disabilities (Mauerberg-deCastro et al., 2010). The authors found that asking blindfolded participants to stand still on balance beams elevated to 10 cm and 20 cm heights caused significant balance deterioration, especially for the disabled individuals at the greater height. The control condition with vision had negligible effect on sway levels. However, when a haptic anchoring task was performed concurrently with the postural task, both groups improved their postural performance. Yet, the larger extent of improvement was exhibited by the disabled individuals in the blindfolded condition. The exploitation of haptic resources was optimized in the most challenging context and better used by the individuals whose balance was most affected.