Lecture 3: Motor Development (QUIZZICAL WEEK)

Average Movement ● The average age for babies to lift their head in a
Timeline: Milestone Graph prone position is shortly after 1 month of age
○ The range of 95% of the babies to do this
ranges from 0 to almost 3 months of age
● The average age for babies to use their arms for
support in a prone and chest up position is shortly
around 2 months of age
○ The range of 95% of the babies to do this
ranges from 0.5 to almost 5 months of age
● The average age for babies to roll over is around 4.5
months of age
○ The range of 95% of the babies to do this
ranges from around 2 months to almost 7
months of age
● The average age for babies to sit without support is
shortly around 6 months of age
○ The range of 95% of the babies to do this
ranges from 5 to almost 8 months of age
● The average age for babies to crawl on hands and
knees is shortly around 7 months of age
○ The range of 95% of the babies to do this
ranges from 5 to almost 11 months of age
● The average age for babies to stand without support
is shortly around 11.5 months of age
○ The range of 95% of the babies to do this
ranges from 9.5 to almost 15 months of age
● The average age for babies to walk without support is
shortly around 12 months of age
○ The range of 95% of the babies to do this
ranges from 10 to almost 15.5 months of age
● This implies that a series of events that has to happen
in a particular order
● However, this gives us a pretty constrained picture of
how motor development unfolds
● Motor development does not unfold with babies
floating in space
○ They might be on a surface, there is gravity,
they might have things that they are supported
by, they might be held up by a parent, having
people around them, there might be a cultural
context which may not be able to decipher
from graphs
○ However, these graphs give us information
about what to expect
○ This graph also helps doctors use them and
identify a delay or something if there needs to
 be an intervention that may be necessary
○ But what we lose is that motor development
in not proceeding the same way for every
baby
● Some ways to collect data are:
○ Getting access to medical records
○ Asking parents for questionnaire
○ Bringing babies to the lab
○ Do a longitudinal study over a period of
months and years
● How did most of these milestones get created
○ Sample of 2000 infants in Alberta, Canada,
1994
○ When we see these milestones chart, they are
usually pulling data from a few different
sources to give us an idea about the averages
and the ranges
○ There was a large scale longitudinal study
with 800 babies from 5 different countries and
information from the study also reflected in
these average scales
● The selection of the positions that are here are the
subset of the kinds of behaviours that a baby can do
that are presented. So this is just some arbitrarily
selected motor milestones that are being presented
○ The chart shows crawling on hands and knees
but it does not show army crawling which is
when the baby’s belly is on the floor which
sometimes happen before crawling on both
hands and knees
● Most of the data that we see comes from having the
babies come into the lab and videotaping them and
observings them for a few minutes or for however
much time and they take freeze frame images and
draw out the babies using the freeze frame images
● These charts also imply that this is a strict biological
timeline but it may also imply that experience matters
a lot
○ When a baby starts to do a particular thing, it
is shaped by not only the biological
maturation, but also the experiences and the
practice that they have and we see examples
from different cultures and child rearing
practices highlighting the importance of the
experience
■ Ex. Some caregivers in the Caribbeans
and in Africa deliberately exercise
their baby to team them to sit and
walk faster than we might here in
 Canada by propping the infants on
their lap a little bit more, provide just
minimal support to practice sitting,
have the baby on their lap and bounce
them to practice walking actions.
These cultures on average have babies
who walk earlier than babies in
cultures where these practices are not
as widely used
■ Ex. In Central Asia, caregivers might
use something called a Guevara,
which is a little cradle where the baby
is really bundled in and this is an
important cultural practice that keeps
the baby safe and happy while the
parents are working. As these children
are in these restricted settings and they
have less ability to practice different
motor activities, their motor
milestones are a little bit delayed
● In recent research studies, they
have seen if using Guevara
delayed motor skills on babies
and if they catch up to the
motor skills of their age group
later, and they found that the
babies do “catch up” to their
motor milestones by the time
they are 5 there is no
difference in their motor
abilities compared to children
who did not have a lot of time
in Guevara. So the milestones
might be influenced by
experience when they are first
emerging and a lot of practice
might make those milestones
show up earlier.
● Even though more restricted
movements might make those
milestones show up a little bit
later, but it appears though that
we are learning more about
how there is catching up
happening
● This means that experience
matters, which is a new idea
and it is not based on “destiny”
● Motor development is not just about muscles moving
 and biomechanics but we have to keep in mind that
motor output can tell us a lot of information and can
be influenced by perception and cognition
● In order for a baby to do a particular action in a goal
directed way, the baby has to have a plan and be
perceiving their environment and understand the way
that they can achieve that goal
● Perception is going to inform the baby about what
movement to do and how to execute that movement
and any constraints that are present in the current
situation that might get in their way
● Perception is guiding their eyes, hands, and their
bodies towards a target, and privind them feedback
about the consequences
○ Ex. If a baby wants a toy that is hiding under
a blanket, they can perceive the half hidden
toy because of their cognitive development,
and they have to move the blanket to reveal it
and then they can make a plan about crawling
towards it, grabbing and pulling the blanket
away, and getting the toy and while all these
information is unfolding, they are using
feedback from the environment to give them
information about whether they are on the
right path and once they have finally gotten
the object that they now have
● Perception and cognition are highly related to motor
activity
● In terms of more of the cognitive aspect, cognition
also helps them come up with new solutions to
problems and also help them avoid repeating
mistakes that they have made last time
● This means that it is not just a matter of executing
motor commands and we have to remember that the
perceptual and the motor
● Motor development shapes the way one is going to
perceive the world and it allows you to interact with
things in a way that helps one’s cognitive
development unfold
○ Ex. When a child moves from not being able
to even sit up at all, and now being able to
support themselves in a sitting position the
way that they can actually see the world and
see the things around them is changing the
way they can interact with those objects and
learn more about those objects is changing
○ Therefore, motor development will change
the way that they can perceive the world and
think about the world
 ● Perception and cognition going in in a circle in
bidirectional way with motor (perception and
cognition influences motor planning and motor
development influences how we can perceive the
world and how we can think of the world)
● As soon as a baby is able to control where their eyes
are looking and how their head is moving, they can
look and learn about events in a much deeper way
● If they can actively turn to look at their parent when
their caregivers in the room, then they can get more
information about the caregiver’s emotion and
responsiveness and so on
● By a developing manual skills like being able to
reach and grab for things which is showing up at
about like 4 to 6 months or so, they can start learning
about objects and surfaces and textures and how they
can manipulate objects that they are exploring, pitting
them up to their face/mouth, and figuring out what
these objects can do
● Once they start to crawl ,now these new vantage
points they can see in different ways and they can
look them up themselves and they are not relying on
a parent to truck them around from places to places
and they can get to where they want to go to and that
changes the exploration game for them
○ This continues to happen as they move into
walking and walking also provides them with
an even higher vantage point where they can
see people in a different way and they can
engage with objects in a different way

Eye-Head Control: ● By 2 months of age, babies have logged more than

Learning by Looking 200 hours of visual experience (even after sleeping a
lot) and in these hours, they can make over 2.5
million eye movement
● This is very useful as a developmental researcher that
babies are actively looking at objects in ways that are
reflective of their perception because we use lookin
time as a measure in the lab to think about what is
interesting to the babies, what they can discriminate,
and what captures their attention
● Action systems in general, we can think about them
specifically in terms of looking and they can be either
exploratory or performatory
○ The idea with exploratory is of an “active
baby” which means that an object might go
by them and and the babies can passively see
them and not because of any particular goal in
mind, but usually they are not just passive
 recipients of whatever happens to float across
their visual space
■ They are making choices about where
to look so there is a lot of active
involvement and it is an exploratory
system because they are exploring
their movement through looking time,
and they will look more at their
mother’s face than a stranger’s face;
and they will look more at faces than
non faces, and they will look more at
complect and interesting images,
instead of looking at black and white
grids which means that the yare
making choices about where to look in
an exploratory way
○ A performatory action system is how their
looks can change their environments so if the
way that they engage their attention visually
will shape their environment
■ Ex. If the baby looks at the caregiver
and then looks at the caregiver’s eyes,
that will probably change how the
caregiver responds because they now
have this eye contact and they might
smile and engage more and hold that
eye contact until the baby looks away.
Therefore, the baby’s response shaped
what the caregiver did and this
interaction between the caregiver and
the infant is an important first social
interaction. This is a way that babies
can show you their agency by
choosing to look and generating a
response from their caregiver by
actively looking at them in a particular
way
● As the baby is being more
involved with the performatory
action system, they are
learning about social
contingency and they are
learning about their agency on
the world and then that
performatory system has a
snowball effect in a way
● When can babies control where they look (head
control)?
● When can babies track moving objects (smooth

Eye-head Coordination
Manual Skills: Learning by
Holding
Early Contingency
Learning
Exploration Encourages
Exploration
Concept Check 1
Locomotion: Learning by
Roaming
Newborn crawling and
rooting in response to
maternal breast odour
Hym et al., 2020
Concept Check 2
Time to Walk! Transition to
“toddlerhood”
The impact of errors in
infant development: Falling
like a baby
Han & Adolph, 2020
Flexibility in Motor
Development
Links between motor and
cognitive development?
pursuit)?
● When are eye and head movements coordinated?
● Reaching and grasping
● Shift from spontaneous to instrumental activity
○ Lewis et al., 1990
● 3-mos played with “sticky” mittens and toys for two
weeks
What does it mean to say that eye-head movements are
performatory?
A. Infants use looks to respond to and initiate changes in
the external environment
B. Infants actively move their head and eyes to explore
their visual environment
C. Infant attention is specifically directed to highly
complex and exciting visual events
● What was measured?
● How did the newborns behave in the maternal odour
condition compared to the control condition?
In the maternal odour condition, how did newborns respond?
A. They took more “steps”
B. They travelled a further distance
C. They showed fewer rooting behaviours
D. All of the above
● Constantly facing new environments
● Constantly changing body
● Early motor development correlated with cognitive
benefits
 ● How can we interpret this?
● Recommendations for parents?
● Unknowns?

Questions to Ponder ● What are some ways that the four overarching themes
apply to motor development? (active/passive,
continuous/discontinuous, nature/nurture, holistic
development)

Summary ● Motor development is more than a triumph of

muscles over gravity
● Perception and cognition are bidirectionally linked to
motor development
● New motor skills provide new learning opportunities
and richer social interactions