Learning to walk changes infants’ social interactions
Section snippets
Participants
Seventeen infants (8 boys and 9 girls, all Caucasian) between the ages of 9 and 11 months (M = 9.9 months) participated in this study. There was no attrition. All infants were able to crawl proficiently on hands and knees, meaning that they could cover 3 m of distance within 10 s (confirmed in the laboratory before testing began). According to parental reports from baby diaries, the infants had an average of 6 weeks of crawling experience (range was 2–10 weeks) and 12 infants had minimal experience
Participants
An additional 16 infants (8 boys and 8 girls) between the ages of 9 and 12 months (M = 10.1 months; matched in age with the infants in Experiment 1) participated in this study. There was no attrition. All infants were able to walk proficiently, meaning that they could cover 3 m of distance within 10 s (confirmed in the laboratory before testing began). This was also the definition used to calculate the onset of independent walking. According to parental reports through baby diaries, the infants had
Participants
Participants were 14 infants (9 boys, 5 girls), all Caucasian except for one Hispanic participant. All participants were observed monthly for 6 months; testing began when the infants were 9 months (±2 weeks) and ended at 14 months (±2 weeks). One infant missed one session due to illness. There was no other attrition.
Longitudinal design
Infants were tested six times in total, beginning at 9 months of age. All infants were crawling at this visit. Each infant then returned to the lab once a month on the infant's
General discussion
Taken together, these experiments suggest a developmental progression that links social and exploratory behaviors with the transition to independent walking. Previous research has found that proximity is critical in initiating interactions between mothers and infants, so the onset of crawling is seen as a milestone in social development (see Campos et al., 2000 for a review). At crawling onset, infants can move to be closer to their mothers, which can be seen as an initiation of an encounter.
Acknowledgements
This research was supported by a Louis B. Perry Grant from Whitman College. Portions of these data were presented at the April 2004 and April 2008 meetings of the International Conference on Infant Studies. I thank Molly Mullen, Naree Nelson, Jennifer Hyman, Christine Osborne, Elizabeth Brey, Katherine Baxter, and Jordan Fitzgerald for help with data collection and coding.
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2022, Journal of Experimental Child PsychologyCitation Excerpt :Finally, and relatedly, Campos and colleagues (2000) proposed that the association between self-locomotion experience and cognitive task performance may perhaps be due to improved attentional discrimination in infants with more self-locomotion experience. Although recent studies have shown that infant walking during exploration is generally not goal directed in nature (Cole, Robinson, & Adolph, 2016; Hoch, Rachwani, & Adolph, 2019), the visual input infants receive when they are moving, whether goal directed or not, seems to be markedly different for crawlers compared with walkers (e.g., Clearfield, 2011; Karasik, Tamis-Lemonda, & Adolph, 2011; Kretch, Franchak, & Adolph, 2014). For example, Kretch et al. (2014) studied 13-month-old crawlers’ and walkers’ visual experiences as these infants moved along a walkway toward their caregivers and showed that the highest point visible was twice as high for walkers compared with crawlers.