The project Sleep2Steps aims to investigate the link between sleep and motor development in infants. Even in the womb and right after birth, babies make spontaneous movements both during sleep and while awake. These movements trigger bursts of activity in the brain that help map the baby's body onto a corresponding map in the brain. Because babies grow so rapidly, these brain–body maps must change quickly as well. At present, we do not know how this updating happens. Given that visible movements during sleep become less common over the first year of life, we speculate that there is ongoing cooperation between daytime movements and brain bursting activity during sleep throughout development and across the lifespan.
In this project, we will take a first look at this idea by recording the electrical activity of the brain in 4-month-old infants using electroencephalography (EEG), while also tracking the movements of their hands and legs. EEG and motion tracking are safe and standard tools in developmental research, but the challenge here is to collect recordings that are long enough to capture brain activity both when the infants are awake and when they are asleep. If successful, we plan to link movements during sleep and wakefulness to specific brain bursting activity. This would open the way to a better understanding of how sleep contributes to the development of motor skills during infancy and throughout life.