The Ecology of Infant Motor Development: Diversity and Dynamics

Session Type: Paper Symposium

Abstract

Infant motor development is an epigenetic process by which caregivers update their expectations and behaviors to meet the demands of infants' changing skills. New motor skills, in turn, create learning opportunities for infants to explore, navigate, and interact with an expanding physical and social environment. Thus, understanding the ecology of motor development, including but not limited to auditory, motor, social environments at home, is important for helping us to better appreciate the diversity and variability in the process of motor skill acquisition and the contributing role of specific experiential factors.

The three papers in this symposium aim to examine (1) infants’ daily activities using an innovative technique to capture real-time opportunities in the home to move and explore; (2) parental language input to same-aged crawling and walking infants using home recording devices and laboratory assessments with socioeconomically distinct samples to explain differences in language trajectories over the transition from crawling to walking; and (3) interactive styles of mothers and fathers from low-income families focusing on routines around physical activity and their relation to motor skill onsets. The discussant will further link the role of culture and context in infant motor skill acquisition and how current work will expand our theories of motor development. Collectively, the presentations emphasize SRCD’s strategic goals by using multiple methods and innovative techniques, including diverse samples and underrepresented communities, and capturing context-specific experiences of infant motor development.

Sub Unit

• Perceptual, Sensory, Motor

Chair

• Minxuan He, Mount Saint Mary’s University

Discussant

• Lana Karasik, City University of New York College of Staten Island

Individual Presentations

• Visuomotor Learning Opportunities are Nested Within Infants’ Everyday Activities - Presenting Author: Kellan Kadooka, University of California - Riverside; Non-Presenting Author: Madelyn Caufield, University of California-Riverside; Non-Presenting Author: Caitlin Fausey, University of Oregon; Non-Presenting Author: John M Franchak, University of California - Riverside

• Push it! Encouraging Crawling Infants to act on Objects Relates to Increased Receptive Vocabulary - Presenting Author: Lukas D Lopez, University of Utah; Non-Presenting Author: Eric A Walle, University of California - Merced

• Low-income Fathers’ and Mothers’ Routine Physical Activity Relates to Infant’s Acquisition of Locomotive Skills - Presenting Author: Minxuan He, Mount Saint Mary’s University; Non-Presenting Author: Natasha J Cabrera, University of Maryland - College Park; Non-Presenting Author: Stephanie M Reich, University of California - Irvine; Non-Presenting Author: Jone Renteria-Aguirregabiria, University of Maryland, College Park; Non-Presenting Author: Denise I Alvarez, University of California, Irvine; Non-Presenting Author: Songholi Enwezoh, University of Maryland, College Park