Infancy is a period of significant change for both the brain and behavior. During the first two years of life, the brain experiences an explosion of synaptic connections and myelination, alongside rapid development in motor, linguistic, and social behavioral abilities. Understanding the relationship between brain development and behavioral…

Dance is a universal human behavior and a crucial component of human musicality. When and how does the motivation and tendency to move to music develop? How does this behavior change as a process of maturation and learning? We characterize infants' earliest dance behavior, leveraging parents' extensive at-home observations of their children.…

The ability to predict upcoming events is essential in infancy because it enables babies to process information optimally and have successful goal-directed interactions with their environment. In this article, we examine how infants generate predictions in perception, cognition, and action, and address whether and how their predictions are…

Crawling is considered an important motor skill for infants. Although infants show variations in their crawling, the association between crawling variations and subsequent development is unexplored. This study investigates the difference in amount of crawling variation between infants with and without subsequent developmental delays. This…

Aim: This systematic review aims to summarize evidence on correlates of fundamental motor skills in typically developing children aged 0-4 years. Methods: A literature search (PubMed, Embase, PsycINFO, and SPORTDiscus) was performed from 2000 till 23 May 2022. Inclusion criteria was cross-sectional and prospective studies examining associations…

The aim of our study is to describe the neuromotor development of preterm and low birth weight infants at 1 and 2 years of corrected age, and to examine the extent to which perinatal, neonatal, socio-demographic, and neuromotor development indices measured at the age of 1 are able to predict infants' development indices at the age of 2. Our sample…

Exploration is considered essential to infant learning, but few studies have quantified infants' task exploration. The purpose of this study was to quantify how infants explored task space with their feet while learning to activate a kick-activated mobile. Data were analyzed from fifteen 4-month-old infants who participated in a 10-min mobile task…

Background: Spontaneous upper extremity movements in infancy provide insight on neuromotor development. Spatiotemporal kinematics have been used to evaluate typical development of reaching, a foundational motor skill in infancy. This study evaluates the relationship between spontaneous upper extremity movements, not elicited by a toy, and motor…

This was a cross-sectional study that aimed to evaluate the association between breastfeeding and motor development of infants at 3-4 months of age in the city of Pelotas, Rio Grande do Sul. The outcome, infant motor development, was evaluated through the Bayley Scale of Infant Development (Bayley III). The prevalence of infants that stopped…

Infant motor development is affected by the sociocultural context in which it takes place. Because societal and cultural practices are dynamic, this exploratory study examined whether the ages at which infants typically learned to crawl, cruise, and walk changed over the past 3 decades. We compiled archival data from 1,306 infants born between…

How do age and the acquisition of independent walking relate to changes in infants' everyday experiences? We used a novel ecological momentary assessment (EMA) method to gather caregiver reports of infants' restraint, body position, and object holding via text messages sparsely sampled across multiple days of home life at 10, 11, 12, and 13 months…

Most research on early language learning focuses on the objects that infants see and the words they hear in their daily lives, although growing evidence suggests that motor development is also closely tied to language development. To study the real-time behaviors required for learning new words during free-flowing toy play, we measured infants'…

Purpose: The purpose of this scoping review was to (a) summarize methodological characteristics of studies examining vocal characteristics of infants at high risk for neurological speech motor involvement and (b) report the state of the high-quality evidence on vocal characteristic trends of infants diagnosed or at high risk for cerebral palsy…

Behavioral flexibility--the ability to tailor motor actions to changing body-environment relations--is critical for functional movement. Navigating the everyday environment requires the ability to generate a wide repertoire of actions, select the appropriate action for the current situation, and implement it quickly and accurately. We used a new,…

Infants learn nouns during object-naming events--moments when caregivers name the object of infants' play (e.g., ball as infant holds a ball). Do caregivers also label the actions of infants' play (e.g., roll as infant rolls a ball)? We investigated connections between mothers' verb inputs and infants' actions. We video-recorded 32 infant-mother…