Using network analysis to capture developmental change: An illustration from infants’ postural transitions

Abstract

Network analysis is a tool typically used to assess interrelationships between social entities in a system. In this methodological report, we introduce how concepts from network analysis can be utilized to capture, condense, and extract complex developmental changes in individual behaviors over time. Using infant postural-locomotor de-928 | THURMAN ANd CORBETTA 1 | INTRODUCTION Development is a complex process, especially in infancy when change occurs rapidly. Further, individual infants influence and are influenced by a multitude of factors that can interact in diverse ways and create unique developmental contexts where the infants' intrinsic characteristics, the people and resources in their local environments, and the cultural values and traditions interact in specific ways. These complex webs of interactions can change continuously as children or their sociohistorical environments develop over time (e.g., Bronfenbrenner, 1977, 1986; Cochran & Brassard, 1979); they also directly influence the way infants behave and act on their environment. For developmentalists, capturing and examining complex developmental changes, between and/or within systems, can be difficult. Creative approaches are needed in order to identify rich trends present in such complex developmental systems data. In recent decades, advancements have been made in methodologies aimed at studying complex systems in infant development, mostly inspired or influenced by the dynamic systems framework. Examples of existing lag-sequential representational techniques involve recurrence plots (RPs) and state-space grids (SSGs). Each of these techniques is often used to detect patterns in repeatedly measured behavior coded continuously from videos and has most commonly been applied in developmental literature to investigate dyadic mother-child interactions. RPs were introduced by Eckmann et al. (1987) and rely on time-series data to highlight recurring patterns between events or behaviors taking place within a particular system, such as a mother-infant dyad. They provide a graphical representation that instantly reveals whether the behaviors occurring in the system adopt periodic or chaotic patterns (e.g., Marwan et al., 2007). Yu and Smith (2013) used RPs to show how parents and infants coordinate joint attention during play by looking at objects being held as opposed to looking at the faces of their social partners. In a similar vein, SSGs, developed by Lewis, Lamey, and Douglas (1999), have been used to provide a visual representation of the relationship between two concurrent variables, often between parent and child, where each individual's movement is represented through different affective states (Hollenstein, 2007). For example, one recent study revealed differences in how fathers and mothers interacted with their infants using SSGs. The researchers found that infant-father dyads changed states more often than infant-mother dyads, whose interactions were more repetitive (Cerezo et al., 2017). These analytical tools have brought greater insight to o...

Developmental changes in infants' physical contact with others across the transitional period from crawling to walking

“…Standing infants can more easily shift their positions or directions according to their communication partners. Thurman and Corbetta (2020) analysed infants' longitudinal data during free play and found that after infants learned to walk independently, they most often used standing postures to transition to other postures and became able to transition between postures more readily. These results suggest a high adaptability of standing postures for walking infants.…”

“…Here, the kneeling and squatting postures were coded as the standing postures. However, Thurman and Corbetta (2020) showed that infants spent most of their time in kneeling and squatting postures while walking, and they discussed that these postures served as important bridges to other postures. Kneeling and squatting postures may have different functions from those of standing postures.…”