ArticleeLife2023
Generating variability from motor primitives during infant locomotor development.
Article in eLife, 2023. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 13 papers.
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Who cites it
13 citing papers in PubMed.
- Development of auditory and spontaneous movement responses to music over the first postnatal year.eLife · 2026Article
- Infants' spontaneous movements explore arm dynamics.Communications biology · 2026Article
- Muscle synergy characteristics during hands-and-knees crawling in children aged 4-6 years.PloS one · 2026Article
- The role of independent walking in the maturation of the spinal locomotor output in children with cerebral palsy.Frontiers in physiology · 2026Article
- Functional symmetrization of neuromotor modules during locomotor development in human infants.Communications biology · 2025Article
- A single low-dimensional neural component of spinal motor neuron activity explains force generation across repetitive isometric tasks.iScience · 2025Article
- Motor synergy and energy efficiency emerge in whole-body locomotion learning.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Motor patterns of patients with spinal muscular atrophy suggestive of sensory and corticospinal contributions to the development of locomotor muscle synergies.Journal of neurophysiology · 2024Article
- Article
- Optimization of modularity during development to simplify walking control across multiple steps.Frontiers in neural circuits · 2023Article
- Stimulating the motor development of very premature infants: effects of early crawling training on a mini-skateboard.Frontiers in pediatrics · 2023Article
- Complexity of modular neuromuscular control increases and variability decreases during human locomotor development.Communications biology · 2022Article
- Neurodevelopmental trajectories from birth to childhood and their impairments: insights from passive, spontaneous, and locomotor-like movements.Frontiers in neurologyReview
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Authors and funding
5 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Motor variability is a fundamental feature of developing systems allowing motor exploration and learning. In human infants, leg movements involve a small number of basic coordination patterns called locomotor primitives, but whether and when motor variability could emerge from these primitives remains unknown. Here we longitudinally followed 18 infants on 2-3 time points between birth (~4 days old) and walking onset (~14 months old) and recorded the activity of their leg muscles during locomotor or rhythmic movements. Using unsupervised machine learning, we show that the structure of trial-to-trial variability changes during early development. In the neonatal period, infants own a minimal number of motor primitives but generate a maximal motor variability across trials thanks to variable activations of these primitives. A few months later, toddlers generate significantly less variability despite the existence of more primitives due to more regularity within their activation. These results suggest that human neonates initiate motor exploration as soon as birth by variably activating a few basic locomotor primitives that later fraction and become more consistently activated by the motor system.
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