TY - JOUR
T1 - Flexibility in Action
T2 - Development of Locomotion Under Overhead Barriers
AU - Rachwani, Jaya
AU - Herzberg, Orit
AU - Kaplan, Brianna E.
AU - Comalli, David M.
AU - O’Grady, Sinclaire
AU - Adolph, Karen E.
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2022. American Psychological Association
PY - 2022/3/21
Y1 - 2022/3/21
N2 - Behavioral flexibility—the ability to tailor motor actions to changing body-environment relations—is critical for functional movement. Navigating the everyday environment requires the ability to generate a wide repertoire of actions, select the appropriate action for the current situation, and implement it quickly and accurately. We used a new, adjustable barrier paradigm to assess flexibility of motor actions in 20 17-month-old (eight girls, 12 boys) and 14 13-month-old (seven girls, eight boys) walking infants and a comparative sample of 14 adults (eight women, six men). Most participants were White, non-Hispanic, and middle class. Participants navigated under barriers normalized to their standing height (overhead, eye, chest, hip, and knee heights). Decreases in barrier height required lower postures for passage. Every participant altered their initial walking posture according to barrier height for every trial, and all but two 13-month-olds found solutions for passage. Compared to infants, adults displayed a wider variety of strategies (squat-walking, half-kneeling, etc.), found more appropriate solutions based on barrier height (ducked at eye height and low crawled at knee height), and implemented their solutions more quickly (within 4 s) and accurately (without bumping their heads against the barrier). Infants frequently crawled even when the barrier height did not warrant a low posture, displayed multiple postural shifts prior to passage and thus took longer to go, and often bumped their heads. Infants’ improvements were related to age and walking experience. Thus, development of flexibility likely involves the contributions of multiple domains—motor, perception, and cognition—that facilitate strategy selection and implementation.
AB - Behavioral flexibility—the ability to tailor motor actions to changing body-environment relations—is critical for functional movement. Navigating the everyday environment requires the ability to generate a wide repertoire of actions, select the appropriate action for the current situation, and implement it quickly and accurately. We used a new, adjustable barrier paradigm to assess flexibility of motor actions in 20 17-month-old (eight girls, 12 boys) and 14 13-month-old (seven girls, eight boys) walking infants and a comparative sample of 14 adults (eight women, six men). Most participants were White, non-Hispanic, and middle class. Participants navigated under barriers normalized to their standing height (overhead, eye, chest, hip, and knee heights). Decreases in barrier height required lower postures for passage. Every participant altered their initial walking posture according to barrier height for every trial, and all but two 13-month-olds found solutions for passage. Compared to infants, adults displayed a wider variety of strategies (squat-walking, half-kneeling, etc.), found more appropriate solutions based on barrier height (ducked at eye height and low crawled at knee height), and implemented their solutions more quickly (within 4 s) and accurately (without bumping their heads against the barrier). Infants frequently crawled even when the barrier height did not warrant a low posture, displayed multiple postural shifts prior to passage and thus took longer to go, and often bumped their heads. Infants’ improvements were related to age and walking experience. Thus, development of flexibility likely involves the contributions of multiple domains—motor, perception, and cognition—that facilitate strategy selection and implementation.
KW - Crawling
KW - Obstacle navigation
KW - Perception
KW - Planning
KW - Walking
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85130617411&partnerID=8YFLogxK
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U2 - 10.1037/dev0001336
DO - 10.1037/dev0001336
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85130617411
SN - 0012-1649
VL - 58
SP - 807
EP - 820
JO - Developmental psychology
JF - Developmental psychology
IS - 5
ER -