From the beginning, babies - if they don't sleep exactly - almost never stop. They constantly punch their arms and legs. But behind the random movements of infants are patterns that help them develop their coordination ability. This is the result of a working group around Hoshinori Kanazawa from the University of Tokyo using movement analyzes in newborns and three -month -old infants.
As the team reports in the journal »PNAS«, the same patterns appeared in different babies, and more so in the older ones. Kanazawa's team filmed the twelve newborns and ten infants involved in the study with the help of precision cameras and markings on their arms and legs to capture the movements in detail. It fed these images into a computer model of muscles and the musculoskeletal system in order to open up the relationships between the various muscles as well as the overall body perception.
According to the experts, the results indicate that the apparently random movements play an important role in the development of sensorimotor skills - the interaction of perception and movements. "We have found that spontaneous movements that seem to be without a clear task or purpose contribute to coordinated sensorimotor development," says Kanazawa, according to a press release from his university.
To date, relatively little is known about how newborns learn to control their movements. "Previous research on sensorimotor development has focused on kinematic properties," explains the researcher. "In other words, muscle activity that moves a joint or body part." His team's study, on the other hand, looks at muscle activity and sensory perception throughout the body, he adds.
It was shown that the babies did not simply carry out movement patterns several times, but prefer to "hike" between different sensorimotor conditions-that is, movement perception combinations-, the working group reports. This was not expected because it is commonly assumed that learning is related to repetitions of sensorimotor interactions. Rather, the study suggests that babies learn movements through "researching" movements according to its own system, according to the press release.
"You don't just repeat the one action, but a whole range of similar actions," explains Kanazawa. In addition, the experts determine connections between spontaneous fluctuations in the musculoskeletal system and those in the brain and spinal cord: "Our result provides a conceptual connection between early spontaneous movements and spontaneous nerve activity." The findings indicate that these unspeaked movements play an important role in learning movement . They regulate the interaction between body awareness and muscles in this early phase of development. This sensorimotor feedback contributes to later coordinated movements.
