Abstract
Infants must perform dynamic whole-body movements to initiate rolling, a key motor skill. However, little is known regarding limb coordination and postural control in infant rolling. To address this lack of knowledge, we examined movement patterns and limb coordination during rolling in younger infants (aged 5–7 months) that had just begun to roll and in older infants (aged 8–10 months) with greater rolling experience. Due to anticipated difficulty in obtaining measurements over the second half of the rolling sequence, we limited our analysis to the first half. Ipsilateral and contralateral limbs were identified on the basis of rolling direction and were classified as either a stationary limb used for postural stability or a moving limb used for controlled movement. We classified the observed movement patterns by identifying the number of stationary limbs and the serial order of combinational limb movement patterns. Notably, older infants performed more movement patterns that involved a lower number of stationary limbs than younger infants. Despite the wide range of possible movement patterns, a small group of basic patterns dominated in both age groups. Our results suggest that the fundamental structure of limb coordination during rolling in the early acquisition stages remains unchanged until at least 8–10 months of age. However, compared to younger infants, older infants exhibited a greater ability to select an effective rotational movement by positioning themselves with fewer stationary limbs and performing faster limb movements.
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Acknowledgments
The authors wish to thank Kayo Asakawa for her assistance with data acquisition and Hiroki Oohashi for his very useful comments on data analysis. We wish to thank Daichi Nozaki and Yoshiharu Yamamoto for their helpful suggestions. We would also like to thank the infants and their parents that participated in this study. Grants This work was supported by JSPS Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research Numbers 13J10645 (to Y.K.), 25285200 (to H.W), and 24119002 (to G.T.).
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Kobayashi, Y., Watanabe, H. & Taga, G. Movement patterns of limb coordination in infant rolling. Exp Brain Res 234, 3433–3445 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00221-016-4741-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00221-016-4741-2