Babies in Motion

After being neglected for decades, motor development is becoming a hot topic of conversation in the autism research community.Part of the difficulty in studying early motor skills — such as sitting up, reaching and grasping — is that infants acquire them in the first few months of life, long before autism emerges. But at a meeting of the High Risk Baby Siblings Research Consortium last week, I heard about a fascinating project that's measuring the precise movements of infants as they interact with objects and people. The researchers are using the data to learn about infant development and build a ‘social’ robot.Daniel Messinger, a psychology professor at the University of Miami, and his students have videotaped eight babies between 2.5 and 5 months old while they play with their mothers in a soundproof room full of toys. The babies wear handmade onesies with a small light attached near each joint. The researchers then use software called PhaseSpace to get a quantitative picture of the babies' movements.Read more at...SFARI, October 2011.