Changes in Mother-Infant Interactive Behaviors During Postural-Locomotor Development

• In Event: 1-093 - Understanding Motor Activity in Infants: The Role of Parent-Child Interaction

Integrative Statement

Little research has investigated changes in caregiver-infant play as infants progress through postural-locomotor development. Independent movement frees infants from holding devices such as carriers and cribs, makes them more independent from their caregivers, and provides infants new ways to interact with their wider environments. Here, we aim to examine how infants’ progression from sitting to walking affects how mothers and infants position their bodies during play, and whether differences in body positioning affect the types of interactive behaviors performed both within sessions and over time.
We followed 13 infants and their mothers in 10-minute laboratory free play sessions every other week from before crawling onset until infants had two or more months of walking experience. The free play space was an 11 ft. x 12 ft. room equipped with toys, a couch, and a small set of infant-sized stairs to elicit a variety of interactive behaviors. Sessions were video recorded and later imported into The Observer XT for coding. Using 15-second intervals, we coded participants’ postures (e.g., sitting, standing), and four categories of physically interactive behaviors with targets: inactive (e.g., watching but not touching), passive/minimal involvement (e.g., hand resting on ball), fine motor manipulations (e.g., rotating/twisting small objects), or gross motor exploration (e.g., pushing cart). The targets were the objects, furniture, or each other. Sitting, squatting/kneeling, and standing were the most recurrent postures, so we examined which types of interactive behaviors were performed during intervals in which those postures were displayed.
In sitting intervals during the pre-locomotor period, results showed that infants were more interactive than mothers and primarily engaged in fine motor manipulations of targets, whereas mothers were more inactive. When sitting during the crawling period, infants’ fine motor manipulations declined while mothers remained inactive. Infants now knelt or squatted to engage in fine motor manipulations of objects, and also used these postures and standing for passive involvement with targets. Finally, during the walking period, infants continued to use kneeling/squatting postures primarily for passive involvement and fine motor manipulations of targets, whereas when mothers knelt or squatted, they were more inactive or passive. Also during this time, sitting and standing postures tended to be used for passive involvement with targets in infants, and for inactive or passive involvement in mothers.
These results show that as infants gain locomotor skills and postural experience over time, infants and mothers clearly use postures differently as they perform interactive behaviors in a play space. In this typical sample, infants seemed to diversify their behavior as they performed familiar and newly acquired postures, whereas mothers seemed to show more passive, and possibly more supportive roles in play across postural-locomotor development.
Ongoing analyses examine whether infants and their mothers change postures when they transition between targets, or if they maintain the same posture. Infant data suggests that when infants shift between targets, they tend to do so while also changing postures, particularly after learning to crawl.

Authors

• Sabrina L Thurman, Elon University
  Presenting Author

• Daniela Corbetta, University of Tennesee, Knoxville
  Non-Presenting Author