It's the journey, not the destination: Locomotor exploration in infants

Abstract

What incites infant locomotion? Recent research suggests that locomotor exploration is not primarily directed toward distant people, places, or things. However, this question has not been addressed experimentally. In the current study, we asked whether a room filled with toys designed to encourage locomotion (stroller, ball, etc.) elicits different quantities or patterns of exploration than a room with no toys. Caregivers were present but did not interact with infants. Although most walking bouts in the toy-filled room involved toys, to our surprise, 15-month-olds in both rooms produced the same quantity of locomotion. This finding suggests that mere space to move is sufficient to elicit locomotion. However, infants' patterns of locomotor exploration differed: Infants in the toy-filled room spent a smaller percent of the session within arms' reach of their caregiver and explored more locations in the room. Real-time analyses show that infants in the toy-filled room took an increasing number of steps per bout and covered more area as the session continued, whereas infants in the no-toy room took fewer and fewer steps per bout and traveled repeatedly over the same ground. Although not required to elicit locomotion, moving with toys encouraged infants to travel farther from their caregivers and to explore new areas.

Where Infants Go: Real‐Time Dynamics of Locomotor Exploration in Crawling and Walking Infants

“…The percentage of bouts ending at destinations did not differ between the first and second halves of the session, t s ≤ 0.90, p s ≥ .38. Our findings corroborate previous work with walkers (Cole et al., ; Hoch et al., ) showing that age, locomotor experience, and exposure to a new environment (as estimated by the split‐session analysis) did not affect the percentage of bouts ending at a destination.…”

“…As in previous work with walkers (Cole et al., ; Hoch et al., ), most of crawlers’ bouts to destinations ended at objects or elevations, not caregivers. A GEE revealed a destination type (objects, elevations, features of the environment, caregiver) by age group interaction, Wald χ 2 (3) = 20.99, p < .001.…”

“…Finally, due to differences in locomotor posture, we expected that the percentage of crawling bouts ending near destinations would differ from the percentage previously reported in walkers (Cole et al., ; Hoch et al., ). Compared to walkers, a low percentage of crawling bouts ending at destinations would suggest that crawling limits locomotor exploration.…”

“…Many of infants’ spontaneous walking bouts—each instance when infants initiate and terminate a step or sequence of steps—are likely too short (1‐3 steps) to carry them to new destinations (Lee, Cole, Golenia, & Adolph, ), and many bouts (60%–70%) do not end near discernable destinations such as toys, caregivers, or climbable surfaces (Cole, Robinson, & Adolph, ; Hoch, O'Grady, & Adolph, ). Infants walk just as much in an empty room as in a room full of toys (Hoch et al., ), and they are just as likely to stop walking after five steps as after fifty steps, suggesting that they start and stop stochastically (Cole et al., ). Moreover, the prevalence of short bouts and the rarity of destinations persists across the development of walking—at least until 19 months of age (Cole et al., ; Lee et al., ).…”

Asking the right questions about the psychology of human inquiry: Nine open challenges

“…Using head-mounted eyetrackers, these studies show that infants rarely move directly toward focal locations (toys placed in different areas of a room) while walking or crawling that they had previously fixated while stationary, as might be expected with goal directed exploration. In addition, they move around empty rooms just as much as ones filled with interesting and novel toys (Hoch et al, 2018). The opposing perspective offered by this work is that infants are not identifying possibilities for new information and strategically orienting toward them but instead engage in "high-variance" motor plans that discover information almost by serendipity.…”