Kinematic strategies in newly walking toddlers stepping over different support surfaces

In adults, locomotor movements are accommodated to various support surface conditions by means of specific anticipatory locomotor adjustments and changes in the intersegmental coordination. Here we studied the kinematic strategies of toddlers at the onset of independent walking when negotiating various support surface conditions: stepping over an obstacle, walking on an inclined surface, and on a staircase. Generally, toddlers could perform these tasks only when supported by the arm. They exhibited strategies very different from those of the adults. Although adults maintained walking speed roughly constant, toddlers markedly accelerated when walking downhill or downstairs and decelerated when walking uphill or upstairs. Their coordination pattern of thigh-shank-foot elevation angles exhibited greater inter-trial variability than that in adults, but it did not undergo the systematic change as a function of task that was present in adults. Thus the intersegmental covariance plane rotated across tasks in adults, whereas its orientation remained roughly constant in toddlers. In contrast with the adults, the toddlers often tended to place the foot onto the obstacle or across the edges of the stairs. We interpret such foot placements as part of a haptic exploratory repertoire and we argue that the maintenance of a roughly constant planar covariance--irrespective of the surface inclination and height--may be functional to the exploratory behavior. The latter notion is consistent with the hypothesis proposed decades ago by Bernstein that, when humans start to learn a skill, they may restrict the number of degrees of freedom to reduce the size of the search space and simplify the coordination.