From behavioral work, it is known that motor experience plays an important role in social development (Campos et al., 2000). For example, infant IJA mediates the relation between self-locomotion and anticipatory gaze during means-ends sequences, indicating a close link between locomotion, IJA and social cognition (Brandone, 2015). Perhaps the observed relation between IJA, vocabulary and coherence is a function of motor experience, given that language and motor skills are closely interrelated (Nelson et al., 2014; Walle and Campos, 2014). Moreover, paradigms that alter motor experience prior to the typical onset of a motor skill result in social changes, like increased attention to faces during preferential looking, and dishabituation to “unexpected” goals when observing an individual’s goal-directed actions (Sommerville et al., 2005; Libertus and Needham, 2011). Based on the power, coherence, and mu desynchronization literature, it is clear that social development and neural changes interact, but how motor development is implicated in this interaction remains unknown.
