Use it or lose it? Effects of age, experience, and disuse on crawling

Abstract

What happens to early acquired but later abandoned motor skills? To investigate effects of disuse on early‐developing motor skills, we examined crawling in two groups of habitual crawlers (34 6–12‐month‐old infants and five adults with Uner Tan Syndrome) and two groups of rusty crawlers (27 11–12‐year‐old children and 13 college‐aged adults). Habitual crawlers showed striking similarities in gait patterns, limbs supporting the body, and crawling speed, despite dramatic differences in crawling practice, posture, and body size. Habitual crawlers trotted predominantly, whereas rusty crawlers showed a variety of gait patterns. Within sequences, habitual crawlers and children showed more switches in gait patterns than young adults. Children crawled faster and kept fewer limbs on the grounds than the other groups. Old crawling patterns were retained despite disuse, but new ones were also added. Surprisingly, results indicate that nothing was lost with disuse, but some features of crawling were gained or altered.

Real-Time Assembly of Coordination Patterns in Human Infants

“…A robust finding in both experiments was the specificity of infants' prior experience. Only cruising, not crawling experience, predicted infants' performance, despite the fact that crawling involves an anti-phase coordination pattern among the four limbs [10,14,19] and typically precedes cruising [18]. Thus, experience with an earlier developing skill does not transfer automatically to a later developing skill.…”

“…Crawling experience leads to a consistent anti-phase pattern where diagonal limbs (right arm, left leg, etc.) move together [10,19,20], but effects of experience on interlimb coordination in cruising are unclear [21,22]. Moreover, unique to cruising, infants must incorporate environmental support into their coordination patterns [21], and the nature of the support (distance between furniture, height of the table, compliance of the couch, etc.)…”

What Does Prone Skateboarding in the Newborn Tell Us About the Ontogeny of Human Locomotion?

“…Infants are not the only ones to crawl; even without practice, adults retain remarkable crawling capacities that can be recruited on demand (Cole, Vereijken, Young, Robinson, & Adolph, ). With training, adults can even become crawling experts, literally running on four limbs or climbing at impressive velocities, as demonstrated in many online video clips (; ).…”

“…Historically, the term "creeping" was used to refer to this type of prone locomotion and the term crawling was used to refer to a manner of prone progression in which the belly stayed in contact with the floor, what researchers and clinicians now refer to as "belly-crawling." Infants are not the only ones to crawl; even without practice, adults retain remarkable crawling capacities that can be recruited on demand (Cole, Vereijken, Young, Robinson, & Adolph, 2018). With training, adults can even become crawling experts, literally running on four limbs or climbing at impressive velocities, as demonstrated in many online video clips (; ).…”

Locomotor learning in infants at high risk for cerebral palsy: A study protocol

“…For example, approximately 90% of infants who walk by 18 months of age first learn to crawl (11). Some similarities have also been observed between gait patterns and crawling speed (12). These relationships are tenuous in children with CP (13) with many crawlers who never learn to walk and many walkers who never crawled.…”