Читать книгу Lifespan Development - Tara L. Kuther - Страница 237

What might be the long-term implications for a consistent hand preference early in infancy? For language? Cognition? Motor skill?

Advancements in motor skill are influenced by body maturation and especially brain development. The pruning of unused synapses contributes to increases in motor speed and reaction time so that 11-year-old children tend to respond twice as quickly as 5-year-olds (Kail, 2003). Growth of the cerebellum (responsible for balance, coordination, and some aspects of emotion and reasoning) and myelination of its connections to the cortex contribute to advances in gross and fine motor skills and speed (Tiemeier et al., 2010). Brain development improves children’s ability to inhibit actions, which enables children to carry out more sophisticated motor activities that require the use of one hand while controlling the other, such as throwing a ball, or that require both hands to do different things, such as playing a musical instrument (Diamond, 2013). As infants and children gain experience coordinating their motor skills, activity in the areas of the brain responsible for motor skills becomes less diffuse and more focused, consistent with the lifespan principle that domains of development interact (Nishiyori, Bisconti, Meehan, & Ulrich, 2016).

Although this infant spends most of his waking hours tightly swaddled to a cradelboard and carried on his mother’s back, he will walk at about a year of age, similar to babies who are not swaddled.

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