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Updated: May 27, 2026

Quantifying Learning in Young Infants: Tracking Leg Actions During a Discovery-learning Task
Published on: June 1, 2015
Locomotor primitives in newborn babies and their development
Nadia Dominici1, Yuri P Ivanenko, Germana Cappellini
1Laboratory of Neuromotor Physiology, IRCCS Santa Lucia Foundation, Rome, Italy.
Abstract:
How rudimentary movements evolve into sophisticated ones during development remains unclear. It is often assumed that the primitive patterns of neural control are suppressed during development, replaced by entirely new patterns. Here we identified the basic patterns of lumbosacral motoneuron activity from multimuscle recordings in stepping neonates, toddlers, preschoolers, and adults. Surprisingly, we found that the two basic patterns of stepping neonates are retained through development, augmented by two new patterns first revealed in toddlers. Markedly similar patterns were observed also in the rat, cat, macaque, and guineafowl, consistent with the hypothesis that, despite substantial phylogenetic distances and morphological differences, locomotion in several animal species is built starting from common primitives, perhaps related to a common ancestral neural network.
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