BIPEDAL · Body Imagery and Posture Effects in Development and Learning

Body Imagery and Posture Effects in Development and Learning

The purpose of this project is to learn how infants get a sense of their own bodies, and how they use their own bodies to learn about other people and the world around them. When infants are born, they cannot hold their own heads up. Less than two years later, they can walk, dance, and run around. When infants are learning, they rely on things they have seen, felt, and experienced. One of the earliest ways that infants begin to learn about other people is by watching their actions and learning to predict the outcomes. For infants, learning to do something new or “produce” a new action, leads to understanding or “perceiving” what someone else is doing better. Parts of the brain that are involved in movement and doing actions are also active when we watch someone else doing the same thing. This is true for infants. Different parts of the brain control different parts of the body. This means they are "somatotopic". For example, when we do something with our hands (or watch someone else do so), a different part of the brain is active than when we are doing (or watching) an action with the feet. The first scientific objective of this project was to study somatotopic activity in motor areas of the brain as infants observe actions using different parts of the body. Preliminary analysis of our data suggests a link between somatotopic activity and infants' fine and gross motor skills. Our second objective was to understand how the motor skills that babies can perform affect their responses to other people’s actions. This objective involved revisiting historical measures of motor development, and finding new ways to measure motor skills. Revisiting past research, we find new phenomena in our data including the omission of the index finger in grasping. Our third objective was to understand how much infants are making reference to, and using, their own bodies and motor systems to learn about other people’s actions. We found that gently restricting 12-month-olds' ability to perform grasping actions affects their processing of others' grasping actions, with effects most pronounced for babies with better motor skills. Our fourth objective was to look at basic forms of perspective-taking (e.g. imagining what something looks like from another person’s point of view) and examine how motor imagery plays a role in them. Preliminary analysis shows robust engagement of motor processes during motor imagery tasks regardless of viewer perspective or posture. The project addressed fundamental aspects of cognitive, social and motor development. The overall conclusion of the work is that motor skills support body representation and social development. An improved understanding of how motor development supports development more broadly is relevant for practitioners in early years care and education, and for parents and caregivers of babies and young children.

Текст от CORDIS, на английски · Данни: CORDIS, © Европейски съюз