Abstract
This longitudinal study assessed how infants and mothers used different postures and modulated their interactions with their surroundings as the infants progressed from sitting to walking. Thirteen infants and their mothers were observed biweekly throughout this developmental period during 10 min laboratory free-play sessions. For every session, we tracked the range of postures mothers and infants produced (e.g., sitting, kneeling, and standing), we assessed the type of interactions they naturally engaged in (no interactions, passive involvement, fine motor manipulation, or gross motor activity), and documented all target transitions. During the crawling transition period, when infants used sitting postures, they engaged mainly in fine motor manipulations of targets and often maintained their activity on the same target. As infants became mobile, their rate of fine motor manipulation declined during sitting but increased while kneeling/squatting. During the walking transition, their interactions with targets became more passive, particularly when sitting and standing, but they also engaged in greater gross motor activity while continuing to use squatting/kneeling postures for fine motor manipulations. The walking period was also marked by an increase in target changes and more frequent posture changes during object interactions. Throughout this developmental period, mothers produced mainly no or passive activity during sitting, kneeling/squatting, and standing. As expected, during this developmental span, infants used their body in increasingly varied ways to explore and interact with their environment, but more importantly, progression in posture variations significantly altered how infants manually interacted with their surrounding world.
Highlights
Object buttons, spinning), or general gross motor activity which corresponded to all behaviors not involving fine motor manipulation. We investigated these interactive behaviors during intervals in which participants were either sitting, squatting/kneeling, or standing because those were the three most commonly displayed postures (Thurman and Corbetta, 2017)
Did interactive behaviors change as infants transitioned from sitting to walking and developed new postural forms? We focused on three postures most commonly produced and examined the types of interactive behaviors infants and mothers each produced when in those postures within and across sessions
Because our data were normalized within postures, for each Generalized Estimating Equations (GEE), we focused on the three interactive behaviors that displayed the largest developmental changes over the 10-session period as our first selection criterion, and we used the mostly represented behavior as our second criterion based on the combined data from the infants and mothers
Summary
The acquisition of each new posture provides a unique lens through which infants can view the world, and it allows them to accrue a range of possibilities for moving about and physically interacting with the environment (e.g., Adolph, 2008; Pierce et al, 2009; Thurman and Corbetta, 2017). Such interactions contribute to psychological change (Campos et al, 2000), and lay a foundation for future cognitive skills (e.g., Bornstein et al, 2013; Libertus and Violi, 2016), and long-term brain development (Bernier et al, 2016)
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