A Functional Approach to Learning to Walk Preliminary Results

Lucile Dupuy¹, Blandine Bril¹, Gilles Dietrich^2,1 and Daniela Corbetta³

⁽¹⁾ Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Groupe de recherche Apprentissage et Contexte, Paris, France
⁽²⁾ Université Paris Descartes, Paris, France
⁽³⁾ The University of Tennesse, Knoxville, USA
luciledupuy@yahoo.fr, blandine.bril@ehess, frgilles.dietrich@parisdescartes.fr, dcorbett@utk.edu

Abstract

Learning to walk is viewed here from a functional point of view. To move forward it is necessary to produce propulsive forces that necessitate creating and tuning a distance between the center of mass (CoM) and the center of pressure (CoP) along the anteroposterior axis .We hypothesize that learning to walk consists in learning to produce these propulsive forces. We present here a longitudinal study showing that the distance between the centre of mass and the centre of pressure along the antero-posterior axis increases during the first months of learning to walk, and that this increase is correlated with velocity.