“Universal" developmental sequences may hide big surprises: The case of the sit-crawl-point sequence

Abstract

Infant self-locomotion by crawling predicts the onset of later shared attention between a baby and an adult via pointing. The claim that self-locomotion is crucial for attention would be weakened if a stationary pre-crawling milestone like sitting was also predictive. We found that sitting onset did indeed predict pointing onset. The necessity of self-locomotion was further weakened by our finding that 25% of babies point before they crawl.