The role of walking experience on whole-body exploration and problem solving

•Locomotor problem solving followed a non-linear developmental trajectory.•Infants with moderate walk experience were less efficient problem-solvers.•Inefficient problem solvers struggled to devise and maintain solutions.•Walking expertise mitigated attentional resources needed to solve a motor problem. One hundred and six infants with varied independent walking experience faced the problem of navigating a tunnel to reach a caregiver. Solving the task required infants to switch from standing to crawling so they could fit their bodies into the tunnel. Spontaneous exploratory behaviors were documented. Infants who did not immediately go through the tunnel received a strict 15-step training protocol to highlight relevant details of the task. Age and walk experience were entered as predictors into a series of stepwise regressions on measures of exploratory and problem-solving behaviors. In general, older infants were more successful than younger infants in completing the task. A significant nonlinear relationship was documented between walk experience and some outcome measures. Infants with a moderate amount of walk experience had more difficulty than those with very little or a lot. Microgenetically documenting problem solving as a function of experience revealed that attention is taxed during mastery of a motor skill. Availability of attentional resources, in turn, impacted walkers’ exploratory behaviors and ability to maintain problem-solving strategies.