Actions

Download Analytics Citations

Export to: EndNote  |  Zotero  |  Mendeley

Collections

This file is not currently in any collections.

Mind Your Step: Learning to Walk in Complex Environments [dataset] Open Access

In everyday contexts, children must respond to both self-related constraints (their own skills and abilities) and environmental constraints (external obstacles and goals). How do young children simultaneously accommodate these to support skilled and flexible behaviour? We used walking in a complex environment as a testbed for two hypotheses. Hypothesis 1: Children will accommodate the self-related constraint of high foot placement variability via Dynamic Scaling (Snapp-Childs & Bingham, 2009). Hypothesis 2: Children will plan ahead, even in complex environments. In our task, 3- to 5-year-olds and adults walked over obstacle sequences of varying complexity. We measured foot placement around the first obstacle in the sequence. Hypothesis 1 was partially supported. In simple, single obstacle environments, children engaged in Dynamic Scaling like adults. Those with more variable foot placement left greater margins of error between the feet and the obstacle. However, in complex, multiple obstacle settings, children employed large, un-tailored margins of error. This parallels other multisensory tasks in which children do not rely on the relative variability of sensory inputs. Hypothesis 2 was supported. Like adults, children planned ahead for environmental constraints. Children adjusted foot placement around the first obstacle depending on the upcoming obstacle sequence. In doing so, they demonstrate surprisingly sophisticated planning. This contrasts with children’s relatively poor planning on other motor and non-motor tasks. We, therefore, show that in the motor domain, even very young children simultaneously control both self-related and environmental constraints. This allows flexible, safe and efficient behaviour.

Descriptions

Resource type

Dataset

Contributors

Creator: Rachel Mowbray ¹
Creator: Dorothy Cowie ¹

¹ Durham University

Funder

Economic and Social Research Council

Research methods

Other description

Keyword

Development
Motor Development
Walking
Planning
Obstacles
Motion Capture
Dynamic Scaling

Subject

Psychology

Location

Language

Cited in

doi:10.1007/s00221-020-05821-y

Identifier

ark:/32150/r13t945q809
doi:10.15128/r13t945q809

Rights

Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY)

Publisher

Durham University

Date Created

File Details

Depositor

R. Mowbray

Date Uploaded

30 March 2020, 12:03:10

Date Modified

27 April 2020, 09:04:13

Audit Status

Audits have not yet been run on this file.

Characterization

File format: zip (ZIP Format)

Mime type: application/zip

File size: 5152

Last modified: 2020:04:16 11:56:00+01:00

Filename: Mind Your Step [dataset].zip

Original checksum: b53bb6fb4cefa8f7344f8dc80437689c