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Quantifying Learning in Young Infants: Tracking Leg Actions During a Discovery-learning Task
11:18

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Published on: June 1, 2015

Locomotor expertise predicts infants' perseverative errors

Sarah E Berger1

  • 1Department of Psychology, The College of Staten Island, Graduate Center, City University of New York, Staten Island, NY 10314, USA. sberger@mail.cuny.csi.edu

Developmental Psychology
|March 10, 2010
PubMed

Insights

Infant inhibition develops with motor skills. More complex tasks increase perseverative errors, especially in walkers compared to crawlers, impacting cognitive resources.

Area of Science:

  • Developmental Psychology
  • Cognitive Neuroscience
  • Motor Development

Background:

  • Inhibition is crucial for cognitive development.
  • Locomotion provides a context for studying infant inhibition.
  • Previous research suggests motor experience influences cognitive abilities.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To investigate the development of inhibition in infants within a locomotor context.
  • To examine the impact of task difficulty on perseverative errors.
  • To explore the relationship between locomotor experience and inhibitory control.

Main Methods:

  • Within-subjects design using A-not-B tasks with varying locomotor demands.
  • Experiments involved walking and crawling 13-month-old infants.
  • Analysis of perseverative errors in relation to task difficulty and locomotor experience.

Main Results:

  • Perseverative errors were more frequent in high-demand conditions than low-demand conditions.
  • Walking infants showed more perseveration than crawling infants.
  • Infants with more locomotor experience exhibited less perseveration, suggesting improved inhibitory control.

Conclusions:

  • Locomotor development is linked to enhanced inhibitory control in infants.
  • Cognitive capacity and attentional resources play a role in infant perseveration.
  • Motor expertise facilitates cognitive flexibility by freeing up attentional resources.

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