![]() ![]() Importantly, however, the walkers actually moved more and spent more time moving than the crawlers. The results showed that, overall, novice walkers fell more per hour than expert crawlers. Researchers analyzed the video by taking note of how much time they spent crawling or walking, how much they were falling, and the distance that they traveled. Videos of 12-14 month old novice walkers and crawlers playing with caregivers were collected and analyzed to try to uncover more information about the way children learn to walk beyond what is artificially measured by unnatural laboratory “tasks”. As of now, there is no unified theory about why children might be motivated to make these changes. Karen Adolph have conducted research just recently published in Psychological Science that demonstrates this important pattern of learning (Adolph et al., 2012).Īdolph and her colleagues set out to try to answer the fundamental question: why do experienced crawlers walk? If an infant is an excellent crawler and can get around perfectly well from a stable four-prong position, why then would the infant take a risk to start locomoting by using such an unstable, risky, and unknown method such as walking? This is actually a familiar pattern with many developments through infancy and childhood- many times, children will adopt new strategies for executing something that is initially more difficult than their current strategy. Researchers at New York University directed by Dr. But, as with many things that require you to fail before you can succeed, infants need to learn to fall before they can learn how to walk. In general, parents’ instincts are to catch their children before they “fall” in many aspects in life. When a baby starts to fall, our natural instincts tell us to protect them and quickly catch them.
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