How Do You Learn to Walk? Thousands of Steps and Dozens of Falls per Day

Abstract

A century of research on the development of walking has examined periodic gait over a straight, uniform path. The current study provides the first corpus of natural infant locomotion derived from spontaneous activity during free play. Locomotor experience was immense: Twelve- to 19-month-olds averaged 2,368 steps and 17 falls per hour. Novice walkers traveled farther faster than expert crawlers, but had comparable fall rates, which suggests that increased efficiency without increased cost motivates expert crawlers to transition to walking. After walking onset, natural locomotion improved dramatically: Infants took more steps, traveled farther distances, and fell less. Walking was distributed in short bouts with variable paths—frequently too short or irregular to qualify as periodic gait. Nonetheless, measures of periodic gait and of natural locomotion were correlated, which indicates that better walkers spontaneously walk more and fall less. Immense amounts of time-distributed, variable practice constitute the natural practice regimen for learning to walk.

Keywords

infant development learning motor processes perceptual motor coordination

Get full access to this article

View all access options for this article.

References

Adolph

K. E.

(1997). Learning in the development of infant locomotion. Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development, 62(3, Serial No. 251).

Adolph

K. E.

(2002). Learning to keep balance. In Kail

(Ed.), Advances in child development and behavior (Vol. 30, pp. 1–40). Amsterdam, The Netherlands: Elsevier Science.

Adolph

K. E.

(2008). The growing body in action: What infant locomotion tells us about perceptually guided action. In Klatzky

R. L.

MacWhinney

Behrmann

(Eds.), Embodiment, ego-space, and action (pp. 275–321). New York, NY: Taylor & Francis Group.

Adolph

K. E.

Robinson

S. R.

(in press). The road to walking: What learning to walk tells us about development. In Zelazo

(Ed.), Oxford handbook of developmental psychology. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

Adolph

K. E.

Robinson

S. R.

Young

J. W.

Gill-Alvarez

(2008). What is the shape of developmental change? Psychological Review, 115, 527–543.

Adolph

K. E.

Vereijken

Shrout

P. E.

(2003). What changes in infant walking and why. Child Development, 74, 474–497.

Barker

R. G.

Wright

H. F.

(1951). One boy’s day: A specimen record of behavior. New York, NY: Harper Brothers.

Bril

Breniere

(1993). Posture and independent locomotion in early childhood: Learning to walk or learning dynamic postural control? In Savelsbergh

G. J. P.

(Ed.), The development of coordination in infancy (pp. 337–358). Amsterdam, The Netherlands: Elsevier.

Cicchino

J. B.

Aslin

R. N.

Rakison

D. H.

(2011). Correspondences between what infants see and know about causal and self-propelled motion. Cognition, 118, 171–192.

10.

Clark

J. E.

Whitall

Phillips

S. J.

(1988). Human interlimb coordination: The first 6 months of independent walking. Developmental Psychobiology, 21, 445–456.

11.

Dominici

Ivanenko

Y. P.

Cappellini

D’Avella

Mondi

Cicchese

. . . Lacquaniti

(2011). Locomotor primitives in newborn babies and their development. Science, 334, 997–999.

12.

Ericsson

K. A.

Krampe

R. T.

Tesch-Romer

(1993). The role of deliberate practice in the acquisition of expert performance. Psychological Review, 100, 363–406.

13.

Ericsson

K. A.

Ward

(2007). Capturing the naturally occurring superior performance of experts in the laboratory: Toward a science of exceptional performance. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 16, 346–350.

14.

Forssberg

(1985). Ontogeny of human locomotor control I. Infant stepping, supported locomotion, and transition to independent locomotion. Experimental Brain Research, 57, 480–493.

15.

Franchak

J. M.

Kretch

K. S.

Soska

K. C.

Adolph

K. E.

(2011). Head-mounted eye tracking: A new method to describe infant looking. Child Development, 82, 1738–1750.

16.

Gentile

A. M.

(2000). Skill acquisition: Action, movement, and neuromotor processes. In Carr

Shepard

(Eds.), Movement science: Foundations for physical therapy in rehabilitation (2nd ed., pp. 111–187). New York, NY: Aspen Press.

17.

Gesell

(1946). The ontogenesis of infant behavior. In Carmichael

(Ed.), Manual of child psychology (pp. 295–331). New York, NY: John Wiley.

18.

Hallemans

De Clercq

Aerts

(2006). Changes in 3D joint dynamics during the first 5 months after the onset of independent walking: A longitudinal follow-up study. Gait & Posture, 24, 270–279.

19.

Hart

Risley

T. D.

(1995). Meaningful differences in the everyday experiences of young American children. Baltimore, MD: Paul H. Brookes.

20.

Hurtado

Marchman

V. A.

Fernald

(2008). Does input influence uptake? Links between maternal talk, processing speed and vocabulary size in Spanish-learning children. Developmental Science, 11, F31–F39.

21.

Johnson

S. P.

Amso

Slemmer

J. A.

(2003). Development of object concepts in infancy: Evidence for early learning in an eye tracking paradigm. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, USA, 100, 10568–10573.

22.

Karasik

L. B.

Tamis-LeMonda

C. S.

Adolph

K. E.

(2011). The transition from crawling to walking and infants’ actions with objects and people. Child Development, 82, 1199–1209.

23.

Kleitman

Engelmann

T. G.

(1953). Sleep characteristics of infants. Journal of Applied Physiology, 6, 269–282.

24.

Kohl

Stone

(2004). Policy gradient reinforcement learning for fast quadrupedal locomotion. Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, 3, 2619–2624.

25.

MacAlpine

Barrett

Urieli

Stone

(2012). Design and optimization of an omnidirectional humanoid walk: A winning approach at the RoboCup 2011 3D simulation competition. In Proceedings of the Twenty-Sixth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-12) (Vol. 1, pp. 1047–1053). Palo Alto, CA: Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence.

26.

MacWhinney

(2000). The CHILDES project: Tools for analyzing talk. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.

27.

McGraw

M. B.

(1945). The neuromuscular maturation of the human infant. New York, NY: Columbia University Press.

28.

Messinger

Ruvolo

Ekas

Fogel

(2010). Applying machine learning to infant interaction: The development is in the details. Neural Networks, 23, 1004–1016.

29.

Miller

P. H.

Seier

(1994). Strategy utilization deficiencies in children: When, where, and why. In Reese

(Ed.), Advances in child development and behavior (Vol. 25, pp. 107–156). New York, NY: Academic Press.

30.

Patla

A. E.

(1997). Understanding the role of vision in the control of human locomotion. Gait & Posture, 5, 54–69.

31.

Piaget

(1952). The origins of intelligence in children ( Cook

, Trans.). New York, NY: International Universities Press. (Original work published 1936)

32.

Schmidt

R. A.

Lee

T. D.

(1999). Motor control and learning: A behavioral emphasis (3rd ed.). Champaign, IL: Human Kinetics.

33.

Shirley

M. M.

(1931). The first two years: A study of twenty-five babies. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.

34.

Siegler

R. S.

(2000). The rebirth of children’s learning. Child Development, 71, 26–35.

35.

Smith

L. B.

Pereira

A. F.

(2011). Not your mother’s view: The dynamics of toddler visual experience. Developmental Science, 14, 9–17.

36.

Tamis-LeMonda

C. S.

Bornstein

M. H.

(1996). Variation in children’s exploratory, nonsymbolic, and symbolic play: An explanatory multidimensional framework. In Rovee-Collier

C. K.

Lipsitt

L. R.

(Eds.), Advances in infancy research (Vol. 10, pp. 37–78). Westport, CT: Ablex.

37.

Thelen

(1986). Treadmill-elicited stepping in seven-month-old infants. Child Development, 57, 1498–1506.

38.

Urieli

MacAlpine

Kalyanakrishnan

Bentor

Stone

(2011). On optimizing interdependent skills: A case study in simulated 3D humanoid robot soccer. In Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (Vol. 2, pp. 769–776). Richland, SC: International Foundation for Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems.

39.

Wohlwill

J. P.

(1970). The age variable in psychological research. Psychological Review, 77, 49–64.

40.

Zelazo

P. R.

(1983). The development of walking: New findings on old assumptions. Journal of Motor Behavior, 2, 99–137.

Supplementary Material

Please find the following supplemental material available below.

For Open Access articles published under a Creative Commons License, all supplemental material carries the same license as the article it is associated with.

For non-Open Access articles published, all supplemental material carries a non-exclusive license, and permission requests for re-use of supplemental material or any part of supplemental material shall be sent directly to the copyright owner as specified in the copyright notice associated with the article.

0.00 MB

0.42 MB

0.50 MB