Psychological Consequences of Walking in Urban Chinese Infants

University of California, Berkeley Professor of Psychology Joseph J. Campos will discuss the psychological consequences of motoric activity in Chinese infants at the University's Institute of East Asian Studies.

Ever since Bishop George Berkeley (for whom our University is named) proposed the importance of motoric activity for mental development, the role of such activity has been highly controversial. The talk will present data to document that in some respects, Bishop Berkeley was correct. infants, for example show a psychological revolution after they begin to CRAWL, a finding with major clinical importance because infants with locomotor delays show delayed acquisition of cognitive and social functioning, which then spurts upon the delayed acquisition of crawling.

What does this have to do with China? Studies with Chinese infants in Beijing, conducted under the supervision of Professor Dong Qi, now President of Beijing Normal University, have confirmed the importance of locomotor activity for urban Chinese infants, for whom crawling is delayed by some 3.5 months due to cultural and safety reasons.

In the last three years, our laboratory has discovered that another locomotor development, WALKING, also has psychological consequences, profoundly affecting the newly-walking infant’s language, emotions, and cognitive development.

Once again, as with the work on crawling, China offers the opportunity to confirm and expand the links between a motoric milestone, this time walking, and psychological development. Urban Chinese infants, as reported to us by pediatricians, begin to walk some 6 weeks on average later than do Western infants. As with the delay in crawling, the delay in walking seems due to cultural and ecological factors, and bears no relation to genes or biology). The study being funded under the auspices of funding from the East Asia Institute will investigate longitudinally the development of walking in both Shanghai and Berkeley to determine via longitudinal testing whether walking is an antecedent of psychological changes, and whether the delay in walking in Shanghai documents a delay in psychological development, following which the Chines e infants show a spurt in cognitive and social functioning, as did crawling infants.

This research will also be related to the outstanding and influential (as well as currently unrecognized) work of the famous Chinese psychologist Z.Y, Kuo, who received his education, including the PhD, from UC-Berkeley.