Infant Reflexes
This reflex occurs when an infant's cheek is stroked, causing them to turn their head toward the stimulus and open their mouth in search of a nipple to feed.
What is the rooting reflex?
This neurological process describes how the brain organizes and interprets sensory information from the body and environment, allowing for appropriate responses and effective functioning in daily activities.
What is Sensory Integration?
This fundamental motor skill typically emerges between 6-10 months of age, involving coordinated movement on hands and knees that helps infants explore their environment and develop spatial awareness.
What is crawling?
This assessment is used to measure a child's motor development, including reflexes, stationary skills, locomotion, object manipulation, grasping, and visual-motor integration.
What is the PDMS-3 (Peabody Developmental Motor Scales, Third Edition)?
This type of intervention focusses on improving a child's fine and gross motor skills through activities such as hand strengthening exercises, coordination tasks, and sensory-motor play, aiming to enhance functional participation in daily activities.
What is motor-based intervention?
This reflex is triggered when an infant feels a sudden loss of support, causing them to extend their arms outward and then bring them back toward their body, often accompanied by crying.
What is the Moro reflex?
This influential psychological theory proposes that people learn social behaviors through observation, imitation, and cognitive processes.
What is Bandera's Social Learning Theory?
This critical motor skill milestone typically emerges between 9-18 months of age, representing a child's first independent bipedal movement and marking a significant leap in mobility and exploration.
What is walking?
This assessment tool evaluates the motor skills and functional performance of children 2.5 to 7 years, focusing on their ability to participate in age-appropriate daily activities across a variety of contexts, including school and home environments.
What is the M-FUN (Miller Function and Participation Scales)?
A pediatric OT uses activities like balancing on a wobble board, jumping on a trampoline, and throwing weighted bean bags to improve postural control and coordination in a 5-year-old with developmental delays.
What is a motor-based intervention targeting postural control, coordination, and motor planning?
This reflex is present at birth and disappears around 4-6 months. When the infant's head is turned to one side, the arm and leg on that side extend, while the opposite arm and leg flex.
What is the Asymmetrical Tonic Neck Reflex (ATNR)?
This specialized therapeutic approach focuses on improving motor function and movement patterns for individuals with neurological disorders, emphasizing hands-on techniques to facilitate motor learning and neural reorganization.
This biological process typically begins between ages 10-15, marked by hormonal changes that trigger physical maturation, sexual development, and rapid growth in adolescents.
What is puberty?
This standardized assessment, completed through caregiver questionnaires, measures a child's sensory processing patterns, focusing on sensory seeking, sensitivity, avoiding, and low registration across sensory domains, to help guide intervention strategies.
What is the Sensory Profile?
In this type of intervention, a therapist facilitates structured group activities like role-playing, turn-taking games, and peer interaction exercises to help children with social communication deficits improve their ability to initiate and maintain conversations, share, and understand social cues.
What is social-based intervention for improving communication and social skills?
This primitive reflex, which typically disappears by 2 months of age, demonstrates early neural pathways for locomotion. When an infant is held upright with their feet touching a flat surface, they produce alternating leg movements that resemble walking.
What is the stepping reflex?
This developmental theory describes eight sequential stages of human psychological growth, where each phase presents a critical psychological crisis that must be resolved for healthy personality development.
What are Erikson's Stages of Psychosocial Development?
This cognitive milestone, typically developing around 8 months of age, describes an infant's understanding that objects continue to exist even when they are no longer visible or directly perceived.
This standardized test assesses a child's visual-motor integration skills, measuring the ability to coordinate visual information with motor responses, and is commonly used to identify deficits in handwriting, coordination, and overall fine motor development.
What is the Beery-Buktenica Developmental Test of Visual-Motor Integration (Beery-VMI)?
This intervention involves the use of social scripts, peer-mediated activities, and video feedback to teach children with social communication challenges how to navigate complex social interactions, such as recognizing emotional cues and adapting behavior in unstructured settings like recess or group work.
What is a social-based OT intervention using social scripts, peer-mediated activities, and video feedback to improve social adaptability?
This reflex emerges in utero and typically integrates by 9-12 months. It is elicited when pressure is applied to the palm of an infant's hand, causing their fingers to close in a strong grip. Persistence of this reflex beyond the typical age range may indicate neurological impairment.
What is the palmar grasp reflex?
This theoretical concept describes the gap between what a learner can do without help and what they can do with guidance from a more skilled individual, named after the Russian psychologist who developed it.
What is Vygotsky's Zone of Proximal Development?
This cognitive milestone, typically emerging in late adolescence and early adulthood, enables individuals to think hypothetically, reason beyond concrete experiences, and engage in complex problem-solving and philosophical reasoning.
What is abstract thought?
This assessment tool is designed for children aged birth to 6 years and evaluates their developmental skills across several domains, including cognitive, physical, communication, and social-emotional development, while also assessing how environmental factors influence their performance.
What is the Hawaii Early Learning Profile (HELP)?
In this integrated intervention, a pediatric OT combines motor activities, such as obstacle courses and ball games, with social skills training, like turn-taking, cooperative play, and conversation initiation, to improve both physical coordination and social communication in children with developmental delays.
What is an intervention that combines motor and social-based activities to enhance physical and social skills?