Travel Broadens the Mind

Abstract

The onset of locomotion heralds one of the major life transitions in early development and involves a pervasive set of changes in perception, spatial cognition, and social and emotional development. Through a synthesis of published and hitherto unpublished findings, gathered from a number of converging research designs and methods, this article provides a comprehensive review and reanalysis of the consequences of self‐produced locomotor experience. Specifically, we focus on the role of locomotor experience in changes in social and emotional development, referential gestural communication, wariness of heights, the perception of self‐motion, distance perception, spatial search, and spatial coding strategies. Our analysis reveals new insights into the specific processes by which locomotor experience brings about psychological changes. We elaborate these processes and provide new predictions about previously unsuspected links between locomotor experience and psychological function. The research we describe is relevant to our broad understanding of the developmental process, particularly as it pertains to developmental transitions. Although acknowledging the role of genetically mediated developmental changes, our viewpoint is a transactional one in which a single acquisition, in this case the onset of locomotion, sets in motion a family of experiences and processes that in turn mobilize both broad‐based and context‐specific psychological reorganizations. We conclude that, in infancy, the onset of locomotor experience brings about widespread consequences, and after infancy, can be responsible for an enduring role in development by maintaining and updating existing skills.

Variation in Vocal-Motor Development in Infant Siblings of Children with Autism

“…To the extent that such delays reflect relative instability in the motor system, they could have far-reaching consequences for the emergence of skills in other developmental domains. Although this topic is as yet not well-researched for motor milestones other than crawling, we do know, for example, that the onset of crawling is related to a wide variety of skills in domains such as responsiveness to referential gestures, spatial coding and search strategies, social referencing, and wariness of heights (Campos et al, 2000). It seems likely that relationships of this sort are also characteristic of other motor onsets.…”

The development of path integration: Combining estimations of distance and heading

“…Explorations of the mechanisms that support it have provided insight into, for example, the development of spatial orientation in infancy (e.g. Bremner, Hatton, Foster, & Mason, 2011;Acredolo & Evans, 1980) and this literature has been complemented by very useful reviews of the relationship between vision, locomotion, and spatial orientation in childhood, as provided by Campos et al (2000) and Rieser & Pick (2007). More recently, a study by Nardini, Jones, Bedford, & Braddick (2008) has explored how information from path integration is combined with visual cues in order to support place memory.…”

Growth and visual information processing in infants in Southern Ethiopia

“…These behaviors may not appear to be directly associated with cognition. However, locomotor experience in infancy is associated with changes in perception, cognition and social-emotional development (see review by Campos at al., 2000). The decreased information processing abilities observed in the infants with poorer growth can be expected to impact a variety of other developmental processes, and imply that small disadvantages in early development may impact higher-order function during a later developmental stage (Colombo, 2001a).…”