Sensorimotor | Motor Function | Brain Balance (2024)

A child’s foundation to growth, development, and learning starts with sensory and motor interaction with the world. Crawling, balancing, visual tracking, and coordination are all ways that a baby experiences the world while simultaneously developing their brain and body.

Often, children who struggle with learning or developmental disorders have sensorimotor system delays.1 It is crucial to improve motor function, sensory detection, and processing before any higher learning, behavioral or academic changes can truly happen. This is at the core of everything we do at Brain Balance.

What are sensorimotor activities?

Sensorimotor activities are tasks and exercises that engage and strengthen the brain by activating our body and our senses at the same time. Sensorimotor activities are a powerful way to strengthen the brain and improve cognitive processing – our brain’s ability to gather information and respond appropriately in our daily lives.

How do sensorimotor activities work?

The sensory and motor systems are tightly integrated. Sensory stimulation and feedback provides important information to the brain through sensory skills like smell, touch, vision, hearing, and balance. Motor function is how your brain and body receives, and then reacts to, sensory stimulation.

When done regularly, sensorimotor activities can help build:

  • Muscle tone, strength, and coordination
  • Rhythm and timing
  • Bilateral coordination
  • Gross and fine-motor skills
  • Primitive and postural reflexes
  • Eye-muscle balance and coordination
  • Vestibular balance and posture

What are some sensorimotor activities to try at home?

At Brain Balance, we’re all about helping families find fun and inventive ways to stay active and keep the brain engaged from the comfort of your home. Below, you can find fun activities to help activate the sensory and motor systems in the brain that the whole family can enjoy. It only takes three to five minutes to engage your muscles, spike your heart rate and positively impact your focus and memory.

Brain Power Exercise Circuit:

3-Minute Circuit (Ages 4-10)

  • Choose 3 activities below. Complete each for 1 minute. Repeat 2x per day.

5-Minute Circuit (Ages 11+)

  • Choose 3 activities below. Complete each for 1 minute. Repeat 2x per day.
  • Bike ride
  • Dance to a song
  • Jumping jacks
  • Jump rope
  • Tag Relay race
  • Stretching & yoga
  • Planks Sit ups
  • Running in place
  • Simon says
  • Frog walk
  • Obstacle course
  • Fast paced walk around the block
  • Army crawl

How can you improve sensorimotor skills?

The Brain Balance Program’s unique combination of activities is designed to drive meaningful change in the symptoms they are experiencing. After families complete the cognitive assessment, we personalize a program that is tailored to your child.

Our program then works to integrate sensory input and strengthen sensorimotor skills through the frequency and duration of activities prescribed in your personalized program.

Sensorimotor | Motor Function | Brain Balance (2024)

FAQs

What is the sensorimotor system balance? ›

Balance is achieved and maintained by a complex set of sensorimotor control systems that include sensory input from vision (sight), proprioception (touch), and the vestibular system (motion, equilibrium, spatial orientation); integration of that sensory input; and motor output to the eye and body muscles.

What is the function of the sensorimotor brain? ›

The main functional areas in the sensorimotor network

These nodes are responsible for processing tactile stimuli and sensory information from the skin. Area 4 is also implicated in fine motor movements and potentially plays a role in visual learning of motor-based skills early in life.

What is the function of the sensorimotor system? ›

The sensorimotor system encompasses all of the sensory, motor, and central integration and processing components involved with maintaining joint homeostasis during bodily movements (functional joint stability).

What are examples of sensorimotor skills? ›

Examples of events that occur during the sensorimotor stage include the reflexes of rooting and sucking in infancy, learning to sick and wiggle fingers, repeating simple actions like shaking a rattle, taking interest in objects in the environment, and learning that objects they cannot see continue to exist.

What are the three principles of sensorimotor function? ›

Moving and Doing
TermDefinition
the three principles of sensorimotor function1. sensorimotor system is hierarchically organized 2. motor output is guided by sensory input +subconsciously monitored by the lower level of the hierarchy 3. learning can change the nature and the locus of sensorimotor control
22 more rows

What is a sensorimotor response? ›

2.1. Enactive neuroscience. What are sensorimotor responses? Not to be confused with the ongoing, continuous sensorimotor coordination when interacting with the environment, SMRs refer to a particular dynamic response to, or resonance with, an environmental feature and not just the extensive environment.

What is motor sensory brain function? ›

The motor cortex in your brain's frontal lobe sends the message that directs the muscles in your arm and hand to reach out toward a cup of soup on your kitchen table. The somatosensory cortex of your parietal lobe assesses the information delivered through your touch of the cup, including judgment of its temperature.

What are sensorimotor actions? ›

During this stage, children will discover pleasurable actions around their bodies. It occurs in the first four months of their lives. Hallmarks of this stage include wiggling their fingers, kicking their legs, or sucking their thumbs.

Why is sensorimotor important? ›

Sensorimotor activities are a powerful way to strengthen the brain and improve cognitive processing – our brain's ability to gather information and respond appropriately in our daily lives.

What is the sensorimotor control? ›

Sensorimotor control is best thought of as a complex, highly integrated process involving thousands of ensembles of sensory information from the periphery that are processed by a network of neurons, interneurons, and CNS centers that use an equally complex system of pathways and neurons to activate muscles and produce ...

What is the sensorimotor process? ›

Sensorimotor processing refers to a process by which sensory information or input is coupled or integrated to a related motor response in the central nervous system. This process underlies both involuntary or reflexive actions and voluntary acts.

What is sensory motor function? ›

Motor skills give expression to the information our senses receive and. process. Sensory motor skills comprise of: 1 Body in space – Knowing where our body is in space helps know where we are in relation to people. and objects and leads to the development of visual motor skills.

What is sensorimotor intelligence? ›

The child relies on seeing,touching, sucking, feeling, and using their senses to learn things aboutthemselves and the environment. Piaget calls this the sensorimotor stagebecause the early manifestations of intelligence appear from sensory perceptionsand motor activities.

What is an example of functional sensorimotor play? ›

Engages in exploratory play (sensorimotor play). Play is focused on bonding with caregivers. Might explore the parent's hair, body, and face as they guide the child to objects such as rattles, rings, or soft animals. Engages in repetitive movements to experience different sounds, sights, feelings, and touches.

What are sensorimotor factors? ›

Sensorimotor skills involve the process of receiving sensory messages (sensory input) and producing a response (motor output). We receive sensory information from our bodies and the environment through our sensory systems (vision, hearing, smell, taste, touch, vestibular, and proprioception).

What is the somatosensory system for balance? ›

The somatosensory system is a complex system of sensory neurons and pathways that responds to changes at the surface or inside the body. It is also involved in maintaining postural balance by relaying information about body position to the brain, allowing it to activate the appropriate motor response or movement.

What sensory system is involved in balance? ›

These three systems are the visual system, the vestibular (inner ear) system, and the proprioceptive (sensory nerves) system. These are listed in order of importance for the situation presently under consideration.

What sensory system involves movement and balance? ›

Vestibular System

The vestibular system contributes to balance and orientation in space. It is the leading system informing us about movement and position of head relative to gravity. Our movements include two positions rotations and linear directionality.

What is the sensorimotor control theory? ›

Their hypothesis states that sensory and motor signals are utilized by the nervous system to form a single internal representation of the body's current configuration (e.g., postural orientation) which is responsible for both the conscious perception of orientation and the transformation of sensory signals for balance ...

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