The cost of simplifying complex developmental phenomena: a new perspective on learning to walk

Do Kyeong Lee · Whitney G. Cole · Laura Golenia · Karen E. Adolph

105 citations0/0 files storedDevelopmental Science

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Children's Physical and Motor Development Motor Control and Adaptation Child and Animal Learning Development

Abstract

Researchers can study complex developmental phenomena with all the inherent noise and complexity or simplify behaviors to hone in on the essential aspects of a phenomenon. We used the development of walking as a model system to compare the costs and benefits of simplifying a complex, noisy behavior. Traditionally, researchers simplify infant walking by recording gait measures as infants take continuous, forward steps along straight paths. Here, we compared the traditional straight-path task with spontaneous walking during 20 minutes of free play in 97 infants (10.75-19.99 months of age). We recorded infants' footfalls on an instrumented floor to calculate gait measures in the straight-path and free-play tasks. In addition, we scored videos for other critical aspects of spontaneous walking-steps per bout, shape of walking path, and step direction. Studying infant walking during free play incurred no cost compared with the straight-path task, but considerable benefits. Straight-path gait was highly correlated with spontaneous gait and both sets of measures improved with walking age, validating use of the straight-path task as an index of development. However, a large proportion of free-play bouts were too short to permit standard gait measures, and most bouts were curved with omnidirectional steps. The high prevalence of these "non-canonical" bouts was constant over development. We propose that a focus on spontaneous walking, the phenomenon we ostensibly wish to explain, yields important insights into the problems infants solve while learning to walk. Other areas of developmental research may also benefit from retaining the complexity of complex phenomena.

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References

1977Toward an experimental ecology of human development.1996Dexterity and its development 2013The Oxford Handbook of Developmental Psychology 2012How Do You Learn to Walk? Thousands of Steps and Dozens of Falls per Day 2003What Changes in Infant Walking and Why 2013Crawling and Walking Infants See the World Differently 2011Head-Mounted Eye Tracking: A New Method to Describe Infant Looking 2010Not your mother’s view: the dynamics of toddler visual experience

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2019An Ecological Approach to Learning in (Not and) Development 2018It's the journey, not the destination: Locomotor exploration in infants 2021Infant exuberant object play at home: Immense amounts of time-distributed, variable practice 2022Ten Lessons About Infants’ Everyday Experiences 2021Cascades in action: How the transition to walking shapes caregiver communication during everyday interactions.

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