Unintentional Consequences: the Impact of Study Participation on Infant Motor Skills

• In Event: Poster Session 12
  In Poster Session: PS 12 Topic - Perceptual, Sensory, Motor

Abstract

Background: Providing infants with guided motor training or opportunities for exploration has been found to encourage early motor development and development in seemingly unrelated domains (Hopkins & Western, 1988; Keller, 2003; Libertus & Needham, 2011; Wiesen et al., 2016). Additionally, motor training has been used as intervention in infants with developmental disorders (Reus et al., 2013). The current study aims to examine whether effects similar to motor training can be obtained when infants are merely tested repeatedly without formal training or enrichment.
Method: A total of 44 mother-infant dyads participated in the current study, with 23 dyads completing between 7- to 9 longitudinal in-home observations between three- and six-months of age and 21 only completed one observation at six-months of age. The observations included 1-minute examination of both sitting and reaching behaviors at each visit. Parents of all participants completed the Early Motor Questionnaire (EMQ, Libertus & Landa, 2013) to quantify their child’s motor skills at 6 months of age. Total EMQ scores and sub-scores for sitting, reaching, and crawling skills were calculated.
Results: Welch's two sample T-test was used to examine whether mere participation in an in-home observation increase children's motor skills at a latter age. Results reveal that mean EMQ total score increased for children who participated in the longitudinal observations compared to those who did not, t(41.54) = 2.34, p = .024). The two groups also differed significantly on reaching-related EMQ items, t(41.41)= 2.92, p = .006) and sitting-related items, t(41.99) = 2.40, p = .021). Differences for the crawling-related items did not reach significance.
Conclusion: Our results indicate mere participation in brief (1 minute) observations of reaching and sitting for a 6-8-week period encourages the development of early motor skills. This training effect was observed during naturalistic in-home observations, without the intention to alter the child's motor skills. Our findings highlight the high degree of malleability of early motor development and also cautions future longitudinal studies to examine whether accidental motor training may occur within their study design.

Authors

• Ran An, University of Pittsburgh
  Presenting Author

• Klaus Libertus, University of Pittsburgh
  Non-Presenting Author