The ability to adjust movements in response to perturbations is key for an efficient and mature nervous system, which relies on two complementary mechanisms -- feedforward adaptation and feedback control. We examined the developmental trajectory of how children employ these two mechanisms using a previously validated visuomotor rotation task,…

Background: Perceptual motor development is crucial during early childhood and not properly addressing it in physical education (PE) can be detrimental. Aim: To determine the effect of a South African curriculum-aligned PE intervention on the visual-motor integration (VMI), visual perception (VP) and motor coordination (MC) of 6-year-old children.…

Movement is prospective. It structures self-generated engagement with objects and social partners and is fundamental to children's learning and development. In autistic children, previous reports of differences in movement kinematics compared to neurotypical peers suggest that its prospective organisation might be disrupted. Here, we employed a…

In the current study, we investigate the implementation of a musical workshop in an early childhood education setting. The workshop is based on a shared space for musical creativity (the Active Musical Room) comprising six different musically relevant objects, which toddlers were free to explore and play with. Inspired by Delalande's…

Environments where children move about provide affordances that play a significant role in their development. This research presents the Affordances for Motor Behavior of Schoolchildren assessment tool, which aims to assess the interdependent systems, such as home, school, and sports activities, that can influence 6- to 10-year-old children's…

To harness the complexity of their high-dimensional bodies during sensorimotor development, infants are guided by patterns of freezing and freeing of degrees of freedom. For instance, when learning to reach, infants free the degrees of freedom in their arm proximodistally, that is, from joints that are closer to the body to those that are more…

Maternal singing is considered vital to infant well-being. This study focuses on vocal emotion expressions in infant-directed singing among mothers in war conditions. It examines the questions: (a) how traumatic war events and mental health problems are associated with the content and valence of vocal emotion expressions and (b) how these emotion…

An ability to perceive tactile and visual stimuli in a common spatial frame of reference is a crucial ingredient in forming a representation of one's own body and the interface between bodily and external space. In this study, the authors investigated young infants' abilities to perceive colocation between tactile and visual stimuli presented on…

In contrast to other primates, human children's imitation performance goes from low to high fidelity soon after infancy. Are such changes associated with the development of other forms of learning? We addressed this question by testing 215 children (26-59 months) on two social conditions (imitation, emulation)--involving a demonstration--and two…

Background: The innate ability for typically developing children to attain developmental motor milestones early in life has been a thoroughly researched area of inquiry. Nonetheless, as children grow and are required to perform more complex motor skills in order to experience success in physical activity and sport pursuits, the range of…

When learning object function, infants must detect relations among features--for example, that squeezing is associated with squeaking or that objects with wheels roll. Previously, Perone and Oakes (2006) found 10-month-old infants were sensitive to relations between object appearances and actions, but not to relations between appearances and…

How do children's early social experiences influence their perception of emotion-specific information communicated by the face? To examine this question, we tested a group of abused children who had been exposed to extremely high levels of parental anger expression and physical threat. Children were presented with arrays of stimuli that depicted…

The authors explore how children's play can support the development of the foundations of mathematics learning and how adults can support children's representation of--and thus the "mathematization" of--their play. The authors review research about the amount and nature of mathematics found in the free play of children. They briefly…

Recent research has shown that 2-year-olds fail at a task that ostensibly only requires the ability to understand that solid objects cannot pass through other solid objects. Two experiments were conducted in which 2- and 3-year-olds judged the stopping point of an object as it moved at varying speeds along a path and behind an occluder, stopping…

This article reports the first year results of a pilot study of 21 developmental milestones achieved by 82 visually impaired children in New York City. Some delays in visual-motor activities were found, as well as differences in the sequence of acquiring skills. Children with additional handicaps acquired milestones at a slower rate. (Author/DB)