Dance is a universal human behavior and a crucial component of human musicality. When and how does the motivation and tendency to move to music develop? How does this behavior change as a process of maturation and learning? We characterize infants' earliest dance behavior, leveraging parents' extensive at-home observations of their children.…

Learning to walk leads to an increase in language abilities; however, the underlying mechanisms accounting for this relation remain unclear. Investigating the quality of early gait control may offer some insights. The purpose of this study was to: (1) quantify how 13-month-olds (n = 39; 39% male) and 24-month-olds (n = 39; 59% male) adapt gait…

The Teaching Personal and Social Responsibility (TPSR) model has been widely utilized in school-based and out-of-school sports and physical activity settings to promote children's meaningful and transferable life skills. The purpose of this systematic literature review was to identify the process elements and the product outcomes of TPSR-based…

Reward has been shown to change behavior as a result of incentive learning (by motivating the individual to increase their effort) and instrumental learning (by increasing the frequency of a particular behavior). However, Palminteri et al. (2011) demonstrated that reward can also improve the incidental learning of a motor skill even when…

The field of early autism research is in dire need of outcome measures that adequately reflect subtle changes in core autistic behaviors. This article compares the ability of a newly developed measure, the Brief Observation of Social Communication Change (BOSCC), and the Autism Diagnostic Observation Schedule (ADOS) to detect changes in core…

In a continuation study, 12 students with dyslexia participated in muscle testing and exercises. Six areas were evaluated via pre- and post-tests: academics (using measures of spelling, reading, and math); parental observations of changes in their children (behavioral, academic or affective); perceptual drawing; oral reading; written language; 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 study reports effects of a neurobehavioral intervention approach on motor skills of four children (ages 1 to 3) with cerebral palsy. Children demonstrated generalization of the movement component by using it to perform both a treated exemplar skill and an untreated exemplar skill, indicating that motor skills can be treated concurrently.…

Motor developmentalists study the processes that underlie change in behavior. There are at least two fundamental ways in which theory and data emanating from motor development are critical components of what undergraduate kinesiology majors should know. First is an emphasis on the lifespan. We are very different organisms as we progress through…

Walking behavior was established in a 20-month-old Down's Syndrome girl by a parent trained in behavior analysis. During a series of 7-minute sessions, the child was given edible reinforcement for taking unsupported steps between two chairs which were gradually moved from 18 to 70 inches apart. In three final generalization sessions, the chairs…

Four procedures for improving the performance of nine motor tasks were compared with six physically handicapped and mentally retarded Canadian Ss, ages 12-25, five of whom were cerebral palsied. (BB)

This study examined behavioral development during the first year of life of 41 infants diagnosed with cerebral palsy, hypotonia, or hypertonia. The KID Scale, an empirically normed, caregiver-report inventory which covers behavior in five domains (cognitive, motor, language, self help, and social) was administered at about 5, 9, and 12 months…