Motor learning in children

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Children are known to have precocious abilities in the learning of languages; do they have similar abilities in the learning of motor skills? Quantitative study of motor learning in children remains very limited. We propose to study a simple form of motor learning in walking, which does not require understanding or intention by the child, thereby allowing us to study very young children. The motor task is to walk on a split-belt treadmill, in which the belts are run at different speeds (one belt twice as fast as the other). When first walking on such a treadmill, adults and children show asymmetry in their walking, which looks like a limp. With continued walking, adults make their walking symmetric after ~60 strides. Our previous work has shown that children can also learn some aspects of this task by the age of 9 months, but the time course of the learning is different from adults. We will determine whether children retain this learning over days, and how the practice schedule affects the retention. Our earlier work further suggested that children may learn better if the belt speeds are gradually made different, rather than being very different right from the start. We will manipulate how the belt speeds are introduced to see how it affects the learning in children. Finally, we want to determine the regions of the brain that are involved in learning this task. We will use adult subjects, and alter the excitability of different regions of the brain using transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) as they are performing this learning. tDCS can non-invasively make specific regions of the brain more or less excitable, so it should alter the learning if the stimulated region of the brain is important for the learning. The regions of the brain to be stimulated are based on hypotheses derived from the unique learning behaviour in children. By contrasting different groups of subjects exposed to different regions of brain stimulation, we hope to identify brain regions involved in this form of learning. The developmental time course of these regions of the brain may then help us explain the motor learning in young children.