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Updated: Aug 8, 2026

Infant Auditory Processing and Event-related Brain Oscillations
06:34

Infant Auditory Processing and Event-related Brain Oscillations

Published on: July 1, 2015

Structure and irregularity in the spontaneous behavior of young infants

S S Robertson1, L F Bacher, N L Huntington

  • 1Department of Human Development, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York 14853, USA. ssr4@cornell.edu

Behavioral Neuroscience
|August 18, 2001
PubMed

Insights

Infant motor activity shows complex, irregular patterns. This study reveals this irregularity is an intrinsic property of early motor control, not random noise, suggesting a structured basis for infant movement.

Area of Science:

  • Developmental neuroscience
  • Motor control dynamics
  • Behavioral organization

Background:

  • Spontaneous motor activity in young vertebrates often exhibits irregular fluctuations.
  • The underlying cause of this irregularity—intrinsic dynamics versus external perturbations—remains unclear.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To investigate the nature of irregular motor activity in human infants.
  • To determine if motor control irregularity is an intrinsic dynamic property or due to random factors.

Main Methods:

  • Analysis of second-by-second variations in general body movement.
  • Studied awake human infants at 1 and 3 months of age.
  • Applied dynamical systems analysis to motor activity data.

Main Results:

  • Identified low-dimensional structure within the irregular motor activity.
  • Observed exponential divergence rates between similar initial motor states.
  • Demonstrated that motor irregularity is characterized by few effective degrees of freedom.

Conclusions:

  • Irregularity in infant motor activity is an intrinsic property of the underlying control dynamics.
  • Suggests a structured, non-random basis for early behavioral organization.
  • Raises questions about the functional role of intrinsic motor irregularity in development.

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