Reconsideration of Infants’ Crawling: Investigation of the Repertoire of Crawling

Abstract

[Purpose] The purpose of this study was to reconsider the crawling of infants by focusing on their repertoire.[Subjects] The subjects were 8 healthy infants aged 5-8 months who were using a Child Care Support Center.[Methods] The crawling of the infants on two types of floor (normal and unstable floor) was recorded on video, and analyzed for the motion of the head and trunk, the limbs, the movement of the center of gravity, and the driving force. The number of the repertoires of crawling was noted after agreement by three researchers.[Results] The repertories of crawling increased, and then decreased with experience of crawling.[Conclusion] Our results suggest that motor learning in infants' crawling progresses from random to rational movements, and that the process is repeated during development.

Video-based evaluation of infant crawling toward quantitative assessment of motor development

“…Adolph et al carried out a longitudinal study to quantitatively evaluate belly crawling and hands-and-knees creeping by analyzing video images at each frame 11 . Recently, under the hypothesis that the U-shaped development observed in general movements also appears in crawling, Terao et al analyzed the relationship between the elapsed days since the start of crawling (hereafter referred to as crawling experience) and the number of the repertoire regarding belly crawling and hands-and-knees creeping 14 . However, these studies employed visual observation methods; thus, objective and quantitative evaluation was difficult.…”