DEVELOPMENT OF HEAD-TURN PREFERENCE FROM 2 TO 12 WEEKS OF AGE: THE INFLUENCE OF ENVIRONMENTAL CONTEXTS

Marianne ´ Jover (1) , M Clark , Daniela Corbetta (2)

1 PsyCLÉ - Centre de Recherche en Psychologie de la Connaissance, du Langage et de l'Émotion
2 Department of psychology

CONTEXT The development of head control in early infancy has been studied for quite a long time (e.g. Turkewitz, 1965 ; Rönnqvist, Hopkins, 1998 ; Lima-Alvarez, et al., 2014). Two overarching conclusions from these studies are that prior to 2 months of age, infants' head control is weak, especially when in the supine position, and that the majority of infants prefer turning their head to the right side. In most of these studies, an experimenter momentarily held the infants head at midline before releasing it, or presented a visual stimulus to induce head turn. Very little is known, however, about the development of infants' spontaneous head movements during this early period. METHOD Spontaneous head movements were explored in 3 infants (GM, LN and MA) followed weekly from the age of 3 to 12 weeks, until they acquired head control. Infants were observed in 5 conditions: baseline, toys-in-view (preferred head turn side), musical toys out-of-view (non-preferred head turn side), mobile overhead, and mother reading to infant. The toys-in-view condition was not considered for this poster since the head would more likely remain turned in that condition. Each condition lasted 5 min while infants laid in supine on a white padded surface surrounded by two vertical white panels to block distractions from the surroundings. Two synched cameras, placed overhead and to the side, recorded the whole session. Head movements were coded with respect to the frontal plane at a frequency of 15 Hz with a custom software which provided 2D kinematic data of selected points on the video (VideoAnalyser, Mare, 2010, figure 1). Data were filtered. The infants' nose was the body point of interest selected to describe head turns (figure 2). The rate of change, direction, and duration of head turns were extracted and compared across conditions within each session. Non-parametric Friedman and Durbin-Conover tests were used to compare the head movements between the conditions.

Domaines: Psychologie

Marianne ´ Jover, M Clark, Daniela Corbetta. DEVELOPMENT OF HEAD-TURN PREFERENCE FROM 2 TO 12 WEEKS OF AGE: THE INFLUENCE OF ENVIRONMENTAL CONTEXTS. Healthy and Active Children (I-MDRC CIAPSE), Sep 2019, Verona, Italy. ⟨hal-02479401⟩