Way to go: the emergence of walking from neonates stepping to independent walking in toddlers

'Way to go: the emergence of walking from neonates stepping to independent walking in toddlers' is the new appointment of the 'Bioelectronics & Neuroengineering Seminar Series' that will take place on May 2, 2023, 3:30 PM, at the Aula Magna, Sant'Anna School. The relator is Prof. Nadia Dominici (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam Netherlands). Click here to join via Microsoft Teams.

Abstract

In order to walk we must set into motion the body and the legs using literally hundreds of different muscles. Each human leg contains over 50 muscles and at least half of them participate actively in the control of leg movement during walking. The general idea that the central nervous system may solve the complexity of the interactions between muscles by using a small number of functional units, also known as locomotor primitives, has received considerable attention. We explored this idea for human locomotion by examining this modular organization during the development of walking in children. When neonates are supported under the armpits with their feet in contact with a surface, they instinctively ‘walk’. This 'stepping reflex' is hardwired in our neural circuitry, however, in typically developing children the ability to walk independently emerges only about one year later. But how do infants learn to walk starting from these rudimentary movements? And how do toddlers’ walking evolve into the sophisticated walking patterns visible in adult locomotion? In this talk, I will discuss how the number and type of the locomotor primitives change with the emergence of independent walking in typically developing children and in children with a neurodevelopmental disorder, like cerebral palsy. Finally, I’ll present how the human cortex selectively interacts with these primitives during walking in typically developing toddlers and adults.

Biosketch

Nadia Dominici is an associate professor at the Faculty of Behavioural and Movement Science at Vrije Universiteit of Amsterdam where she works on the interplay between brain and muscular activity underlying independent walking in children, as well as on the biomechanics of human locomotion. After a master diploma in Physics, she obtained a PhD in Neuroscience at the University of Rome “Tor Vergata”, for work on the neurophysiology of locomotor development in children. She has held research positions at the Laboratory of Neuromotor Physiology of the Santa Lucia Foundation in Rome, where she focused on central pattern generation networks and on the development of locomotion in children, and at the Experimental Neurorehabilitation Laboratory at the University of Zürich, and EPFL in Lausanne, where she developed neurorehabilitation techniques to restore walking in animals after spinal cord injuries. She was awarded the Suzanne Klein-Vogelbach -Prize for the Research of Human Movement prize in 2013, and a 5-year NWO (Netherlands Organisation for Scientic Research) Vidi grant in 2015 and a 5-year ERC (European Research Council) Starting Grant in 2016.