A research group led by Designated Assistant Professor Seikei Kanazawa at the University of Tokyo Graduate School has found that spatio-temporal patterns of muscle sensation and movement due to "spontaneous movement" occur in babies several months after birth, who can hardly perform conscious movement. showed that developmental changes may be occurring.
Babies around the first few months of life sometimes engage in ``spontaneous movements'' that aimlessly move their limbs.During this period, the understanding of the surrounding environment and the world is lacking, and the body cannot be freely controlled, but this spontaneous movement has been considered important for human development.However, the changes in the body caused by voluntary movement and their significance were unclear.
The research group inferred muscle activity and sensation from observations of infant movements, and analyzed the resulting flow of information to explore the meaning of spontaneous movements during early development.As a result, along with seemingly meaningless spontaneous movements, multiple muscle sensations and motor modules (functional groups) arise, and "sensory motor wandering" occurs, in which the flow of information between modules changes from moment to moment as if wandering. discovered that it exists.
It was found that this sensorimotor wandering leads to the development of systemically coordinated movements, and from reflexive movements to anticipatory movements.It was suggested that this developmental change may be based not only on the frequency of experiences, but also on behaviors such as curiosity and exploration.
From an interdisciplinary perspective, in addition to the maturation of the nervous system such as the brain, interaction and repetition with the external world and the self's body are important for the development of human behavior and cognitive functions.Research results suggest that such reflexive developmental processes begin with spontaneous movements in the earliest stages of development.In the future, we would like to elucidate the role of spontaneous movement in infants not only in simple movements and sensations, but also in complex behaviors and cognitive functions.
Paper information:[Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences] Open-ended movements structure sensorimotor information in early human development
