Background: Understanding how or whether sedentary behavior affects motor competence in young children is important considering that children spend a lot of time sedentary. The aim of this study was to examine whether sedentary behavior predicts motor competence in young children. Methods: A longitudinal study with a total of 372 children aged 3.5…

Prevalence of self-injurious behavior (SIB) is as high as 50% among children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Identification of risk factors for the development of SIB is critical to early intervention and prevention. However, there is little empirical research utilizing a prospective design to identify early risk factors for SIB. The purpose…

Manual dexterity is known to gradually progress with developmental age. In this study, we evaluate the performance of unimanual and bimanual actions under perturbed and unperturbed conditions in children between 4 and 10 years of age. Behavior was assessed by means of trajectory measurements and degree of bimanual coupling. The results showed that…

Multiple levels of category inclusiveness in 4 object domains (animals, vehicles, fruit, and furniture) were examined using a sequential touching procedure and assessed in both individual and group analyses in eighty 12-, 18-, 24-, and 30-month-olds. The roles of stimulus discriminability and child motor development, fatigue, and actions were also…

Studied hand-mouth coordination in 40 infants of 1-3 days. Sucrose solution was delivered intraorally every 2 minutes. Results provide evidence for sucrose as a calming agent and for a coordinative behavorial system that integrates hand-mouth activity in supine human infants. (RJC)

Four developmentally delayed babies were given semicircular canal stimulation in an effort to facilitate their motor and reflex development. All of the children showed motor and/or reflex changes that were attributable to the vestibular stimulation. In addition, some evidence was obtained linking changes in stereotypic responding to the vestibular…

This study compared the occurrence and characteristics of self-stimulatory behaviors of 5 children with developmental delays and 10 nondisabled children (matched for either mental or chronological age). Few differences were found between groups in percentage of time spent in self-stimulatory behavior, the variety of such behaviors, the speed at…

Longitudinal studies of mother-child interactions for the third trimester of pregnancy to age 4 are described. The effort is aimed at analyzing early childhood data to determine stability of mother-infant interaction, correlations among mothers' character as defined by adaptive and maladaptive defenses, major conflicts, sense of reality, and…

This study demonstrated the effectiveness of a therapeutic motor development program based on a games analysis model for reducing feminine game choices in emotionally disturbed boys. (MM)

This qualitative study of rocking in four congenitally blind children, ages 10 to 13, used in-depth interviews, observations, psychomotor assessments, and reviews of school and other records. Findings revealed similarities in the children's early medical histories, delays in motor development, constraints on vigorous movement, and limited peer…

Compared lateral preference patterns for normal and learning-disabled children. Results indicated that learning-disabled children were more bilateral on factors involving visually fine motor activity, listening, and fine motor foot preference. Also studied the verbal-spatial abilities of learning-disabled children classified as normal or…

This study of the oral motor behaviors of seven toddlers (age 15 months) may be interpreted to indicate that: (1) mandibular coordination follows a developmental continuum from earlier emerging behaviors, such as chewing and sucking, through babbling, to speech, or (2) unique task demands give rise to distinct mandibular coordinative constraints…

Compared coupling characteristics of clapping simultaneous with walking or galloping, consistency across trials, and phasing variability among 4-, 6-, 8-, and 10-year-olds. Found that for walk/clap tasks, children adopted adult-like coupling patterns by age 8 and with the same consistency by age 10. Across age, children became less variable in…

Explores the relation between the infant's ability to negotiate the environment and the quality of the infant-mother attachment relationship. (HOD)

The original "Bayley Scales of Infant Development" (BSID) (Bayley 1969) have been among the most popular measures of performance and aptitude of infants. In the present study the reliability and construct validity of mental and motor scores on the revised Bayley Scales of Infant Development-II (BSID-II) were investigated. A national…