Neural correlates of action processing and infant motor skills

• In Event: Poster Session 07
  In Poster Session: PS 07 Topic - Perceptual, Sensory, Motor

Abstract

A limited number of studies have investigated how infants’ experience with various motor skills influences how they perceive and process these skills when observing others perform them (e.g. van Elk et al., 2008; Yoo et al., 2016). From these studies, we know that infants show increased neural motor activity when viewing actions they are skilled at (compared to those they are unskilled at or unfamiliar with).
However, a more basic question remains open; how infants’ motor skills relate to their neural activity as they perform actions themselves. First indications come from two papers (Cannon et al., 2015; Yoo et al., 2016) which found that aspects of reaching competency (specifically, latency between the initiation of a reaching movement and contact with an object) were significantly related to infants’ neural activity as they observed others’ actions, but not significantly related to their own neural activity as they performed actions.
It is important to note that, in these studies, both neural activity and behavioral measures of grasp competency were averaged across all trials within individuals. To our knowledge, the question of how neural activity relates to the concurrent quality of motor behaviors infants are producing remains unanswered.
As part of a larger study, we aimed to investigate how infants’ neural activity during action production and observation relate to the quality of their motor behaviors as well as their motor development more generally. We expected to replicate findings that infants’ neural activity during action observation is related to their own motor skills. Further, by examining neural and behavioral data trial-by-trial (rather than averaged across the testing session), we hope to better understand why, thus far, neural activity during action production has not been found to relate to the quality of those actions being produced.
A sample of 66 9-month-old infants from the Chicago area participated in a study in which they themselves and an experimenter reached for a small toy. EEG data were collected both when infants performed reach-grasp actions and when they observed the experimenter perform these actions. In particular, we were interested in changes in alpha activity over sensorimotor areas, and thus assessed the 6-9 Hz alpha range over these regions.
A preliminary analysis finds trends dissimilar to previous findings – infants’ latency to grasp objects is unrelated to their neural activity during action production and observation (see Figure 1). Additionally, parent-report measures of infants’ general fine motor and visual receptive skills relate negatively but non-significantly with grasp latency, and significantly relate to neural activity during action production (see Figure 2).
Additional coding will address other aspects of reach-grasp quality, including reaching errors and handedness. Forthcoming analyses will test how, across individuals, variations in motor performance relate to neural activity during action production within trials.

Authors

• Tess Fulcher, University of Chicago
  Presenting Author

• Marlene Meyer, Radboud Universiteit Nijmegen
  Non-Presenting Author

• Josselin Martinez
  Non-Presenting Author

• Amanda Woodward, University of Chicago
  Non-Presenting Author