Exploratory Movements and the Development of Joint Action

• In Event: 2-035 - Exploratory Actions and the Development of Acting with Others

Integrative Statement

When performing daily activities, individuals must adopt body configurations, orientations, and movements that support multiple concurrent tasks. This sensitivity of postural control to the demands of concurrent tasks emerges in early infancy and continues to be refined into the second decade of life (see Haddad et al., 2013). Although even young infants will move rhythmically with adults when socially engaged (Feldman et al., 2011), it isn’t till late preschool that a more general ability to coordinate activity with others to a task emerges. In experiments with adults, variability in postural movements has been linked to perceptual, cognitive and social performance. We propose that changes in the ability to coordinate activity with others is developmentally linked to the postural system’s capacity to adapt to task demands. In order to explore this possible link, we have developed a video game like task that can be played individually or with another player.
This task was used to measure developmental (4- and 7-year-olds) and individual differences in the dynamics of postural control in individual and joint game contexts. In order to measure the dynamics of postural control the task requires participants to shift their balance to move a virtual object. In order to measure the ability to coordinate activity with others the task is performed both alone and with an adult experimenter. Participants controlled a virtual ball’s motion by moving side to side and up and down, navigating through a virtual environment collecting targets. In a training phase participants learned to control the virtual ball by moving the ball alone through an open space as quickly as possible to collect targets. In the social phase, participants collect targets with the experimenter who controlled another ball in the same virtual environment or controlled one direction of participant’s ball’s movement (see Figure 1).
Participants at both ages showed quick mastery of the task getting quicker and more efficient at the task over trials (see Figure 2). The younger children’s movements were more coordinated with the experimenter in the single ball condition, whereas, the older children were well coordinated with the experimenter in the single and two ball conditions. Younger children may have been better at coordinating with the adult experimenter in the single ball condition simply because the experimenter’s actions were simpler and more directly connected to the child’s actions. In the two-ball condition, the participants would have had to both direct their ball’s movement and attend to the experimenter’s ball in order to coordinate. Children who had more exploratory variability in their movements tended to be more coordinated with the adult experimenter across conditions. Exploratory movements help children to explore possible configurations of the motor system, and thus, might provide more opportunity to coordinate with adult experimenter. These findings provide insight into how exploratory movements support the development of social coordination.

Authors

• Ashley Dhaim, University of Connecticut
  Presenting Author

• Adam Sheya, University of Connecticut
  Non-Presenting Author