Abstract
Various attempts have been made to elucidate the development patterns in the spontaneous movements of infants through longitudinal evaluations. Movement complexity has been found to demonstrate u-shaped changes in the measurements focusing on limb movements. However, researchers have not yet clarified how other characteristics, besides movement complexity, change over time. This paper presents a longitudinal evaluation of spontaneous movements in infants using evaluation indices calculated through markerless video analysis. Nine infants with corrected ages from [Formula: see text] to 15 weeks participated in the experiments. We confirmed the change in indices over time using statistical methods. Index changes can be classified as positively correlated, u-shaped, inverted u-shaped, and uncorrelated. We also confirmed that the u-shaped and inverted u-shaped indices are negatively correlated. Furthermore, the principal component analysis revealed that the first principal component had the inverted u-shaped changes with the corrected age. These results suggest that it is important to synchronize the inverted u-shaped variations in the movement and velocity with the u-shaped changes in the movement complexity for infant development.