Longitudinal effects of independent walking on postural and object experiences in home life

John M. Franchak¹, Kellan Kadooka¹, & Caitlin M. Fausey<sup>2

1</sup>University of California, Riverside
²University of Oregon

Walking augments exploration

• Walking independently lets infants:

  • Take more steps and spend more time in motion (Adolph et al., 2012)

  • See distant objects and locations (Kretch et al., 2014)

  • More easily carry objects (Karasik et al., 2011, 2012)

• These benefits suggest that walking ability facilitates developmental cascades (Oudgenoeg-Paz et al., 2016; Walle & Campos, 2014)

Motor devel. ➝ object exploration

Sitting > Supine/Prone (Soska & Adolph, 2014)

Motor devel. ➝ object exploration

Crawlers > Walkers (Herzberg et al., 2021)

Characterizing opportunities for learning

• Skills only matter if they’re used…

• Brief lab or home visits miss the potential moderating effect of daily routines (e.g., playing, feeding)

• Video observation may bias infant and caregiver behaviors (Bergelson et al., 2019; Tamis-LeMonda et al., 2017)

Ecological Momentary Assessment

Prompt caregivers to observe infant behavior in brief phone surveys multiple times per day (Franchak, 2019)

Aims of current study

Longitudinal EMA sampling from 10-13 months to:

• Assess how the emergence of walking alters time spent in different body positions and time spent restrained by furniture/caregivers

• Determine how everyday object holding changes based on infants’ body position and restraint

Capturing full-day experiences

Capturing full-day experiences

Participants

• Scheduled sessions at 10, 11, 12, and 13 months (± 1 week)
• N = 62 participants (34 female) contributed M = 3.6 sessions, responding to M = 28.3 samples/session
  

Session	# Infants	Min	Mean	Max
10	52	9.71	9.98	10.31
11	57	10.76	11.01	11.34
12	58	11.78	12.00	12.32
13	54	12.70	13.00	13.34

Participants

Families recruited from 29 US states

Ethnicity	N	%
Hispanic or Latino	11	17.7
Not Hispanic or Latino	51	82.3

Race	N	%
Asian	1	1.6
Black Or African American	1	1.6
More Than One Race	7	11.3
Other	7	11.3
White	46	74.2

Samples reflected in-the-moment behavior

• Response time = time between text and completing the survey

• Responses had to be made within 15 minutes

• Response time median = 0.5 minutes

• 84.2% of texts were responded to within 1 minute

Samples were distributed across the waking day

Samples were distributed across the waking day

Measuring body position and restraint

Measuring body position and restraint

Measuring body position and restraint

Measuring body position and restraint

With age, prone decreased and upright increased

How did walking alter daily experiences?

• After each session, a structured phone interview determined whether the infant had begun walking

• Infants were considered walkers if > 25% of their samples in a session occurred on or after their walking onset date

Session	Walking	Not Walking
10	3	49
11	8	49
12	17	41
13	25	29

No difference in supine by age or by walking

Prone time decreased by age and walking status

Non-walkers sat more than walkers regardless of age

Upright time increased with age and with walking status

Restraint decreased with age/walking

• Restraint time decreased from 49.6% at 10 months to 41.1% at 13 months

• Non-walkers were restrained more frequently (M = 48.2%) than walkers (M = 38.9%)

Daily object holding experiences

Infants held objects 40.4% of the time—roughly 4.5 hours each day, based on an 11.1-hour waking day (Galland et al., 2012)

What proportion of sitting time did infants spend holding objects?

Body position and restraint moderate object experiences in the moment

Body position and restraint moderate object experiences in the moment

Two possible effects

1. Overall change in holding: Walk onset ➝ decreased time sitting ➝ decreased overall-object-holding-time

2. Holding adapts to motor context: Walk onset ➝ decreased time sitting ➝ upright-object-holding-time increases while sitting-object-holding-time decreases

Walking infants integrate object holding into new time spent upright

Walking infants integrate object holding into new time spent upright

Summary: What experiences change over development?

Summary: What experiences change over development?

Summary: What experiences change over development?

Non-walkers hold…
3.2 hrs/day while sitting
0.7 hrs/day while upright

Walkers hold…
2.1 hrs/day while sitting
1.8 hrs/day while upright

Conclusions

• Effects at multiple timescales

Conclusions

• Effects at multiple timescales

• Dissociable effects of age and walking ability

Conclusions

• Effects at multiple timescales

• Dissociable effects of age and walking ability

• Multiple drivers of change

Acknowledgments

Data Collection Team

• Chase Butler

• Madelyn Caufield

• Ariana Diaz

• Juelle Ford

• Tasnia Haider

• Sasha Kapadia

• Preet Kaur

• Vanessa Scott

Funding

• NSF BCS-1941449

• UCR Regents Faculty Award

References

Adolph, K. E., Cole, W. G., Komati, M., Garciaguirre, J. S., Badaly, D., Lingeman, J. M., Chan, G., & Sotsky, R. B. (2012). How do you learn to walk? Thousands of steps and dozens of falls per day. Psychological Science, 23, 1387–1394. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797612446346

Bergelson, E., Amatuni, A., Dailey, S., Koorathota, S., & Tor, S. (2019). Day by day, hour by hour: Naturalistic language input to infants. Developmental Science, 22, e12715.

Franchak, J. M. (2019). Changing opportunities for learning in everyday life: Infant body position over the first year. Infancy, 24, 187–209.

Galland, B. C., Taylor, B. J., Elder, D. E., & Herbison, P. (2012). Normal sleep patterns in infants and children: A systematic review of observational studies. Sleep Medicine Reviews, 16(3), 213–222.

Herzberg, O., Fletcher, K. K., Schatz, J. L., Adolph, K. E., & Tamis-LeMonda, C. S. (2021). Infant exuberant object play at home: Immense amounts of time-distributed, variable practice. Child Development, 93(1), 150–164.

Karasik, L. B., Adolph, K. E., Tamis-LeMonda, C. S., & Zuckerman, A. (2012). Carry on: Spontaneous object carrying in 13-month-old crawling and walking infants. Developmental Psychology, 48, 389–397. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0026040

Karasik, L. B., Tamis-LeMonda, C. S., & Adolph, K. E. (2011). Transition from crawling to walking and infants’ actions with objects and people. Child Development, 82, 1199–1209. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8624.2011.01595.x

Kretch, K. S., Franchak, J. M., & Adolph, K. E. (2014). Crawling and walking infants see the world differently. Child Development, 85, 1503–1518. https://doi.org/10.1111/cdev.12206

Oudgenoeg-Paz, O., Volman, M. C. J. M., & Leseman, P. P. M. (2016). First steps into language? Examining the specific longitudinal relations between walking, exploration and linguistic skills. Frontiers in Psychology, 7, e1458.

Soska, K. C., & Adolph, K. E. (2014). Postural position constrains multimodal object exploration in infants. Infancy, 19, 138–161. https://doi.org/10.1111/infa.12039

Tamis-LeMonda, C. S., Kuchirko, Y., Luo, R., Escobar, K., & Bornstein, M. H. (2017). Power in methods: Language to infants in structured and naturalistic contexts. Developmental Science, 20, e12456.

Walle, E. A., & Campos, J. J. (2014). Infant language development is related to the acquisition of walking. Developmental Psychology, 50, 336–348. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0033238