Infant Motor Development Laboratory

The Infant Motor Development Laboratory is designed to study the development of motor and perceptual behavior in young infants during their first year of life. The laboratory includes a naturalistic observation area and a room to collect kinematic data using motion analysis systems. Both research spaces include state of the art video equipment and advanced computer technology.

A major emphasis and educational goal of the laboratory is to provide a well-rounded research experience to students in motor development while in undergraduate or graduate school. Every semester the laboratory hosts a number of students who become active research members on ongoing projects. Students can use this experience in the laboratory to earn research credits for either HK 490, or HK 496 at the undergraduate level or HK 698 at the graduate level.

While in the laboratory students learn:

• about past and current leading theories in motor control and development,
• how to develop research methods suitable for the study of motor control and development,
• how to use specialized video and computer based equipment to collect and analyze data,
• how to use sophisticated programming techniques to measure and quantify behavior,
• how to write research findings into appropriate research reports.

Research Summary and Agenda

The main research agenda of the laboratory is to understand how goal-oriented forms of behavior emerge from infants early erratic behaviors. Our investigations focus on two aspects of infant behavior; (1) the analysis of upper arm spontaneous patterns from birth to 1 year of age, and (2) the formation of goal oriented behaviors such as early reaching, bimanual coordination, hand preference, and object manipulation. One goal is to understand how spontaneous patterning contributes to the formation of early manual skills. A second goal is to understand how task experience and developing motor milestones influence this pattern formation.

Our recent work has shown that infants produce identifiable forms of upper limb spontaneous activity throughout the first year that influence in specific ways the organization of reaching and bimanual coordination. For example, infants sometimes traverse periods where their spontaneous upper arm activity tends to be "locked" into synchronous forms of patterning. During these periods, infants reach predominantly with two hands. At other times, these synchronous tendencies dissolve. Accordingly, infants reach more unimanually and demonstrate lateral preferences. Currently, we are examining when these one- or two-handed reaching patterns become adapted to object size, if infants use perceptual cues such as touch or vision to adapt their reaching patterns, and we are trying to understand whether these developmental changes in interlimb coordination correspond to changes in posture, force control, and object manipulation. Overall, this research aims to show that identifiable and changing forms of patterning reflect the continuous dynamic reorganization of the central nervous system, as infants perceive and act on the world. In particular, we aim to show that these specific forms of behavior are progressively carved out from early diffuse movement patterning through dynamic and selective processes.

The Infant Motor Development Laboratory includes a naturalistic observation area and a room to collect kinematic data using motion analysis systems.

For more information or to request to be a research assistant contact Dr. Daniela Corbetta.