Developmental cascades: How motor development alters everyday learning experiences

University Of California-Riverside, Riverside CA

Investigators

Abstract

Recent evidence suggests that acquiring new motor skills, such as learning to sit and learning to walk, may facilitate other aspects of infants’ development, such as spatial cognition and language learning. Despite studies linking motor development to cognitive and language development, a key source of support is missing: How does motor development change infants’ everyday learning experiences? Presumably, learning to sit and to walk creates new ways for infants to interact with other people and their surroundings, which facilitates other developmental advances. However, few studies have measured such changes outside of laboratory contexts. The central goals of this project are to innovate new methods for measuring infants’ daily learning experiences in the home, and to use those methods to create a unique, multi-modal datasets to share with the research community. Analyzing these data will reveal how the development of sitting and walking alters infants’ motor, visual, object, and language experiences, and whether and how those changing experiences facilitate later cognitive and language development. Characterizing the everyday learning experiences that support typical development, and how they are facilitated by motor development, may help in the design of interventions to improve developmental outcomes in infants with motor delays. Two studies will identify how infants’ everyday learning experiences change when learning to sit/walk, and whether such changes have a facilitative role on the development of spatial cognition and language. The first study will use a combination of recording techniques—video, wearable head cameras and eye trackers, inertial movement recording, and dense caregiver-report surveys—to assess learning experiences across the entire day in the home. The effect of motor skill acquisition on daily experiences will be determined by comparing infants of the same age who have versus have not acquired sitting/walking. The second study will longitudinally track how learning experiences change month-to-month over the transitions to sitting and walking. Follow-up tests of spatial cognition and language learning will determine which, if any, everyday learning experiences linked to motor skills facilitate later development. Grounding facilitative effects of motor skill in direct, longitudinal measurements of learning experiences in the home will provide stronger causal evidence compared with previous laboratory-based approaches. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.