Dominici Lab

Research focus

ERC Starting Grant · 2016

Brain meets spine: the neural origin of toddler’s first steps

A child’s first steps may be small, but they are a giant leap for its development. Children have an instinct to walk from the moment they are born – a 'stepping reflex' hardwired in their neural circuitry – but it typically takes about one year before they can start walking independently. In a pioneering work published on Science in 2011, I demonstrated that the coordinated muscle activation in neonate stepping is described by two basic activation patterns that are retained throughout development, and supplemented by two new ones that be-come manifest in toddlers. These seminal findings triggered profound questions: Is the development of new patterns an emergent prop-erty, indicative of…

From the public funding record at EU CORDIS. Describes the funded project, not the reviews below.