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Mind your step: learning to walk in complex environments.

ABSTRACT: In everyday contexts, children must respond to both self-related constraints (their own skills and abilities) and environmental constraints (external obstacles and goals). How do young children simultaneously accommodate these to support skilled and flexible behaviour? We used walking in a complex environment as a testbed for two hypotheses. Hypothesis 1: children will accommodate the self-related constraint of high foot placement variability via dynamic scaling. Hypothesis 2: children will plan ahead, even in complex environments. In our task, 3- to 5-year-olds and adults walked over obstacle sequences of varying complexity. We measured foot placement around the first obstacle in the sequence. Hypothesis 1 was partially supported. In simple, single obstacle environments, children engaged in dynamic scaling like adults. Those with more variable foot placement left greater margins of error between the feet and the obstacle. However, in complex, multiple obstacle settings, children employed large, un-tailored margins of error. This parallels other multisensory tasks in which children do not rely on the relative variability of sensory inputs. Hypothesis 2 was supported. Like adults, children planned ahead for environmental constraints. Children adjusted foot placement around the first obstacle depending on the upcoming obstacle sequence. In doing so, they demonstrate surprisingly sophisticated planning. We, therefore, show that in the motor domain, even very young children simultaneously control both self-related and environmental constraints. This allows flexible, safe and efficient behaviour.

SUBMITTER: Mowbray R

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7286854 | biostudies-literature | 2020 Jun

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Mind your step: learning to walk in complex environments.

Mowbray Rachel R Cowie Dorothy D

Experimental brain research 20200513 6

In everyday contexts, children must respond to both self-related constraints (their own skills and abilities) and environmental constraints (external obstacles and goals). How do young children simultaneously accommodate these to support skilled and flexible behaviour? We used walking in a complex environment as a testbed for two hypotheses. Hypothesis 1: children will accommodate the self-related constraint of high foot placement variability via dynamic scaling. Hypothesis 2: children will plan ...[more]

PMID: 32405684

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Project description:RationaleCompared with control subjects, patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) have an increased incidence of falls and demonstrate balance deficits and alterations in mediolateral trunk acceleration while walking. Measures of gait variability have been implicated as indicators of fall risk, fear of falling, and future falls.ObjectivesTo investigate whether alterations in gait variability are found in patients with COPD as compared with healthy control subjects.MethodsTwenty patients with COPD (16 males; mean age, 63.6?±?9.7 yr; FEV1/FVC, 0.52?±?0.12) and 20 control subjects (9 males; mean age, 62.5?±?8.2 yr) walked for 3 minutes on a treadmill while their gait was recorded. The amount (SD and coefficient of variation) and structure of variability (sample entropy, a measure of regularity) were quantified for step length, time, and width at three walking speeds (self-selected and ±20% of self-selected speed). Generalized linear mixed models were used to compare dependent variables.ResultsPatients with COPD demonstrated increased mean and SD step time across all speed conditions as compared with control subjects. They also walked with a narrower step width that increased with increasing speed, whereas the healthy control subjects walked with a wider step width that decreased as speed increased. Further, patients with COPD demonstrated less variability in step width, with decreased SD, compared with control subjects at all three speed conditions. No differences in regularity of gait patterns were found between groups.ConclusionsPatients with COPD walk with increased duration of time between steps, and this timing is more variable than that of control subjects. They also walk with a narrower step width in which the variability of the step widths from step to step is decreased. Changes in these parameters have been related to increased risk of falling in aging research. This provides a mechanism that could explain the increased prevalence of falls in patients with COPD.

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Mind your step: learning to walk in complex environments.

Publications

Mind your step: learning to walk in complex environments.

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