what makes neonates walking? – neolocom

The ultimate goal of this proposal is to develop interventions for infants with locomotor disabilities that are more effective and can be initiated at birth. The first step is to establish with typically developing infants the most effective sensory stimuli for promoting locomotion at birth and during early development. The second step, which we will not initiate in the current proposal, is to test those stimuli with locomotor-disabled infants.

Our research is motivated by two lines of evidence. First, newborn human infants are able to make coordinated stepping movements when they are held upright and their feet contact a surface. This primitive form of locomotion, tested routinely by pediatricians, is often considered a spinal reflex destined to disappear around 2 months of age. However, if trained regularly on a solid surface or a treadmill, this primitive locomotion becomes more frequent and coordinated and leads to an earlier onset of independent walking in typical and disabled infants. Second, our research team has recently shown that visual stimulation can drive newborn air stepping. Three day-old newborns will “walk in the air” when held above a virtual treadmill that simulates the visual consequences of forward locomotion (Barbu-Roth et al. 20009). This remarkable discovery has significant theoretical and clinical implications. Theoretically, the finding suggests that high-level processes might have a major influence over early locomotor patterns. Clinically, the effectiveness of interventions designed to facilitate locomotion in motorically disabled infants can be enhanced by including visual stimulation. In addition, coupling visual stimulation and air stepping allows interventions to begin at birth, much earlier than is possible with the currently favored treadmill stepping paradigm.

The project will take three major directions. First, we will establish whether visual stimulation can enhance newborn stepping and crawling on a compliant surface designed to mimic the uterine wall. We will also establish whether newborn locomotion will adapt to optic flows that simulated forward and backward translation. Second, we will characterize the development of visually controlled locomotion over the first six months of life using the same paradigms developed for the newborn experiments. Third, we will test the novel idea that newborn locomotion can be facilitate by exposure to familiar odors.

These three innovative lines of experimentation will contribute significantly to our understanding of the coupling between perception and locomotion early in life. The findings will ultimately be used to diagnose perceptual-motor problems at birth and to design more effective interventions for infants with motoric delays.

The research team we have established for this project is international and interdisciplinary, crossing the fields of Psychobiology, Embryology, Kinesiology, and Developmental Psychology. Each of the participants is recognized as an expert in their field of study and each has a solid track record of contributions to scientific understanding.