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Motor development

What and why motor development

• Study of motor development is study of behavioral development
• Motor behavior requires and reveals the working of the mind
• Infant motor development include the acquisition of:
  
  • Basic skills such as moving head and eyes to look around, moving arms and hands to grasp objects and moving the body to sit up or go somewhere
  • Higher-order skills such as stacking boxes
  • Skills to support interaction such as moving face for expressing emotions, moving arms and hands to point and moving mouth to talk
• Movements are constrained by the current status of the body
• Movements are shaped by social influences and culturally specific child rearing practices
• New motor skills create new opportunities for learning and can instigate cascades of development, far afield from the original accomplishment
• In contrast to perception, cognition and other psychological functions, motor behaviors are directly accessible to observation
• To study motor development we can observe children in their natural play environment

Motor milestones

• The child’s development during the first year of life is especially charactered by very prominent and observable motor development
• When infants are born they have very little control over their bodies, but as motor development takes place, the infant is gradually able to, for instance, walk on its own. » Motor development allows the infant to being fully dependent to being a mobile child with the ability to move around and interact with objects and people
• Motor development depends on genetic factors and environmental influences/experiences
• Milestones can be seen as indicators for the speed of development
• Motor development is part of the psycho motor development, referring to changes in the child’s perceptual, cognitive, affective, motor and social capabilities
• There’s variation in the time that children reach these milestones

Observing motor development

• Alberta Infant motor Scale (AIMS) » much used in WEIRD samples » standardized observational examination tool used to asses the maturation of the motor skills of infants in 0-18 months
• Four categories: prow (lying on the belly), spine (lying on the back), sitting position and standing position
• AIMS home video: parents film their children at home under standardized conditions, after which pediatric physical therapists assess the video

Early motor development progress

• Measuring developmental progress ideally takes place by means of multiple, repeated measures overtime
• Three categories (in a study between Dutch and Canadian children)
  
  • Late bloomers (do not accelerate in motor growth before 9,5 months)
  • Gradual developers (even motor growth)
  • Early developers (rapid motor growth before 9,5 months)
• Not every child travel the same path in motor growth

Dynamic system theory

• Explains development as the probabilistic (= possible) outcome of the interactions of processes at many levels and systems
• The theory is useful in the understanding of how movements develops and changes and can provide inside in the child’s readiness to acquire new motor abilities
• Development is a result of constant change, as such, movement is produced from the interaction of multiple subsystems
  
  • Within the person = individual constraints
  • Task = task constraints
  • Environment = environmental constraints
• All of the subsystems spontaneously self-organize. They come together and interact in a specific way to produce the most sufficient movement solution for each specific task.
• There is no most important subsystem.
• Development is a non-linear process » movements do not develop in a continues way but rather a small but critical change in one subsystem can cause the whole system to shift, resulting in new motor behavior (face shift/transition period) » critical to the dynamic application for motor development
• The core of the theory: development as a process of constant change
  
  • Dynamic: at all points in development, thought and action change from moment to moment in response to the current situation, the child’s immediate past history, and the child’s longer-term history in similar situations
  • Systems: each child as a well-integrated system, in which many subsystems – perception, action, attention, memory, language and social interaction – work together to determine behavior

Four kinds of development

• Embodied » forces from the environment on the body and from the body on the environment
• Embedded » infants move in an environment that challenges them constantly
• Enculturated » development shaped by social and cultural influences and parental beliefs
  
  • Social information and behavior from caregivers is important for adaptively guiding actions
  • Caregivers dis-/encourage the infants actions
  • Historical and cultural differences in childrearing practices have a profound influence on which motor skills children acquire, the sequence and ages at which children acquire them and subsequence developmental outcomes
  • The more daily ‘tummy time’ infants experience, the earlier the onset of prow skills
• Enabling » as a child grows, it reveals more of the world (e.g. first the child can only crawl, so it can see less of the world)
  
  • Motor development is linked to improvement of perception and cognitive abilities
  • Motor development both promotes and demands improvements in behavioral flexibility because new motor skills provide new opportunities for action and require new solutions
  • The availability of opportunities for learning does not that learning occurs
  • Multiple pathways can lead to the same developmental outcomes and often cooperate to push the development to a certain outcome

• Developmental cascades
  • Crawling
    • Mental rotation
    • More flexible memory retrieval
    • Use of landmarks to find hidden caregivers
  • Onset walking
    
    • Increase receptive and productive vocabulary via carrying objects
    • BUT: relations decrease/disappear overtime » opportunity for exploration remains important mediater