Laura Claxton

Purdue University West Lafayette | Purdue · Department of Health and Kinesiology

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 (a) quantify how 13-month-olds (n = 39; 39% male) and 24-month-olds (n = 39; 59% male) adapt gait based...

When engaging in manual or visual tasks while sitting, infants modify their postural sway based on concurrent task demands. It remains unclear whether these modulations are sensitive to differences in concurrent task demands (holding a toy vs. looking at a toy being held by someone else), and whether the properties of the support surface impact the...

Portable force-measurement technologies are becoming increasingly popular tools to examine the maturation of postural motor milestones, such as sitting and standing, in infants. These convenient, low-cost devices provide numerous opportunities to characterize postural development outside of the laboratory. However, it is important to understand the...

Intuitively, carrying a toy while walking may be difficult for newly walking infants. However, during home observations, newly walking infants fell less when carrying toys and preferred carrying small toys while walking (Karasik et al., 2012). Thus, infants may realize that carrying small toys may be beneficial for walking and may intentionally foc...

Onset of independent walking is linked to increases in receptive and productive language abilities in infants (Walle & Campos, 2014); however, the mechanisms underlying this relationship remain unclear. Whereas exploration and movement through the environment are likely important factors in explaining this relationship (Oudgenoeg-Paz et al., 2015;...

Human locomotion is an inherently complex activity that requires the coordination and control of neurophysiological and biomechanical degrees of freedom across various spatiotemporal scales. Locomotor patterns must constantly be altered in the face of changing environmental or task demands, such as heterogeneous terrains or obstacles. Variability i...

If adults are carrying an object and start to experience a loss of balance, they frequently maintain hold of that object instead of dropping it. In these loss-ofbalance situations, adults tend to maintain hold of the object, instead of freeing both hands to aid in balance recovery. The current study investigated the ontogeny of this behavior by exa...

Poster presented at the 2017 Translational Science Conference

The Microsoft Kinect has been used in studies examining posture and gait. Despite the advantages of portability and low cost, this device has not been used to assess interlimb coordination. Fundamental insights into movement control, variability, health, and functional status can be gained by examining coordination patterns. In this study, we inves...

The ability to adapt locomotor patterns is necessary to successfully navigate through environments of various terrains and obstacles. The variability of timing from stride to stride is not random, but rather patterned and complex. Specifically, fluctuations that occur across shorter timescales (e.g. 5-10 strides) are statistically correlated to flu...

When infants first begin to sit independently, they are highly unstable and unable to maintain upright sitting posture for more than a few seconds. Over the course of 3 months, the sitting ability of infants drastically improves. To investigate the mechanisms controlling the development of sitting posture, a single-degree-of-freedom inverted pendul...

Independent sitting is a critical motor milestone that affords the exploration of and interaction with the environment (Adolph et al., 2008). The dynamics of infant sitting posture have traditionally been examined using a force plate (a device designed to capture body movements). Although accurate, force plates are expensive and heavy, limiting the...

Studies on pretense mental state understanding in young children have produced inconsistent findings. These findings could potentially emerge from the confounding influences of action manipulation or the failure to examine possible influences on individual children's performances. To address these issues, we created a task in which 68 3- and 4-year...

In typical daily life, adults routinely adapt posture so that balance can be maintained while other goal-directed activities are performed. Interestingly, newly standing infants also control posture based on the demands of a task. It is unknown if the ability to properly adapt postural movements as a goal-directed task is performed emerges soon aft...

A simple “expression” account of the relation between executive function (EF) and children's developing theory of mind (ToM) has difficulty accounting for the generality of the changes occurring in children's mental-state understanding during the preschool years. The current study of preschool children (N = 43) showed that EF—especially conflict EF...

Independent stance is one of the most difficult motor milestones to achieve. Newly standing infants exhibit exaggerated body movements and can only stand for a brief amount of time. Given the difficult nature of bipedal stance, these unstable characteristics are slow to improve. However, we demonstrate that infants can increase their stability when...

Children's television programming frequently uses interactive characters that appear to directly engage the viewers. These characters encourage children to answer questions and perform actions to help the characters solve problems in the televised world. Children readily engage in these interactions; however, it is unclear why they do so. To invest...

Posture becomes integrated with other goal-directed behaviors early in infancy and continues to develop into the second decade of life. However, the developmental time course over which posture is stabilized relative to the base of support during a dynamic manual precision task has not been examined. Postural-manual integration was assessed in 7-ye...

HADDAD, J.M., S. RIETDYK, L.J. CLAXTON, and J.E. HUBER. Task-dependent postural control throughout the lifespan. Exerc. Sport Sci. Rev., Vol. 41, No. 2, pp. 123-132, 2013. Routine activities performed while standing and walking require the ability to appropriately and continuously modulate postural movements as a function of a concurrent task. Chan...

Routine activities performed while standing and walking require the ability to appropriately and continuously modulate postural movements as a function of a concurrent task. Changes in task-dependent postural control contribute to the emergence, maturation, and decline of complex motor skills and stability throughout the lifespan.

The postural sway patterns of newly standing infants were compared under two conditions: standing while holding a toy and standing while not holding a toy. Infants exhibited a lower magnitude of postural sway and more complex sway patterns when holding the toy. These changes suggest that infants adapt postural sway in a manner that facilitates visu...

Studies have suggested that proper postural control is essential for the development of reaching. However, little research has examined the development of the coordination between posture and manual control throughout childhood. We investigated the coordination between posture and manual control in children (7- and 10-year-olds) and adults during a...

Previous studies have found that preschoolers are confused about the relationship between two-dimensional (2D) symbols and their referents. Preschoolers report that 2D images (e.g. televised images and photographs) share some of the characteristics of the objects they are representing. A novel Comparison Task was created to test what might account...

Toddlers grasp a tool more effectively when it is self-directed (e.g., spoon) than other-directed (e.g., hammer), possibly because the consequences of self-directed actions are more obvious. When the negative consequences of an inefficient grip were made equally salient, the self-directed versus other-directed differences remained.

This research examined the relative contributions of two aspects of executive function-inhibitory control and planning ability-to theory of mind in 49 3- and 4-year-olds. Children were given two standard theory of mind measures (Appearance-Reality and False Belief), three inhibitory control tasks (Bear/Dragon, Whisper, and Gift Delay), three planni...

When adults reach for an object, kinematic measures of their approach movement are affected by what they intend to do after grasping it. We examined whether such future intended actions would be reflected in the approach-to-grasp phase of infant reaching. Twenty-one 10-month-old infants were encouraged to either throw a ball into a tub or fit it do...

Typescript. Thesis (M.S.)--University of Massachusetts at Amherst, 2002. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 59-61).