Typical and Atypical Motor Development

performance.

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AN INTRODUCTION TO MOTOR DEVELOPMENT

Introduction

Movement is the only way we can interact with other human beings, animals, and the environmental context (Wolpert et al 2003). No other human facility allows us to do this in so many ways, whether speaking, walking, writing, climbing, or touching. A child progressing from birth to some level of maturity in movement sheds light not just on this developmental process but also on the evolutionary nature of our being. The two words we use here are ‘development’ and ‘movement’, and together they specify the one process of motor development. In this chapter, we take these two terms both together and separately, examining their definitions and characteristics, and paving the way for future chapters that examine the course of motor development in children who have both typical and atypical resources.

Development

From a general perspective child development is a difficult idea to comprehend because changes in human abilities are both broad and complex. Development begins at conception, and at birth the newborn infant is small, essentially immobile, and without verbal communication. In the ensuing 20 years, numerous changes occur that signal larger, more mobile, and more skilful individuals who typically can reason about, and communicate, abstract notions, and who have a personal sense of self and are part of a social system. The examples in this text highlight the many changes in the human abilities concerning movement that attract our attention; some are quite visible, and others are inferred from the more visible ones.

We typically use theory to try to explain how development or a particular part of development takes place. With respect to human development there are theories of cognition, social development, language, and motor development. They seek to explain the observable phenomena from a particular point of view. For example, Newman and Newman (2007), in their text on human development, group their theories into three categories: those that emphasize biological aspects; those that emphasize environmental factors; and those that place emphasis on the person–environment interaction. As we navigate through this chapter and the rest of the book, it will become evident that, although the bulk of our effort is focused on examining the child’s resources, we place much of our emphasis on the interactions among the child, the task, and the environment, which collectively specify the unit of analysis when examining functional motor skills.

Descriptions of change

Physical growth changes are easily recognized, beginning with the observation that children get larger. Humans are microscopic in size at conception and grow to a length of about 20 inches at birth (after only 9 months of life), and a height of 60 inches or more 20 years after birth. Head size at birth represents approximately 25% of the total body length; by the age of 20 a person’s head size accounts for approximately 15% of total body length. Changes in body proportions during puberty distinguish male and female physiques, including changes in secondary sex characteristics. Internal systemic changes during puberty provide the capability for reproduction. Also, changes in body-tissue composition and physiological functioning give males relatively more muscle mass than females and a greater capacity for taking in and transporting oxygen to fuel the muscular system.

Pubescence and adolescence are commonly recognized as major periods of change. Pubescence is a time of biological change; adolescence is a time of social change in which an individual becomes more personally and socially independent. These two periods not only influence but also change one another. Changes in secondary sex characteristics, which vary in age at onset and extent of change, often imply greater personal–social development and so change others’ expectations and behaviours when interacting socially with these more mature-looking adolescents. The reverse may be true when the social importance of pubertal body changes leads to an increase or decrease in the amount of physical activity undertaken, which can also change body appearance. Our descriptions of change and examples of periods of change should impress us with the scope of human development and should indicate how we can characterize its various aspects.

A complete list of all developmental changes would quickly highlight the enormity and complexity of human development, as well as the realization that development is continuous and ongoing throughout the life cycle. We begin by looking at how periods of change lead to new capabilities that allow individuals to perform new actions they were unable to do earlier. If we think of what we do as requiring some type of internal organization in relation to our surrounding environments, then major periods of change are those times when we reorganize the manner in which we perform tasks – the individual really does change into a different human being – and we recognize the change as another period of development.

Motor development

For all mammals, whether they walk on four (quadrupedal) or two (bipedal) legs, the capacity to walk immediately at birth or relatively soon after is critical to survival. For quadrupeds born in the wild, survival requires nutrition and protection from predators, and walking immediately at birth supports both of these needs, although not always successfully. The newborn human, and our wild genetic relatives (great apes and chimpanzees), enters the world with less urgency for immediate locomotion survival; a set of reflexes enable contact with the mother and necessary nutrition. For the human infant in the ensuing 5 or 6 months, these reflexes support access to resources and nutrition while the infant is undergoing rapid growth of bone, muscle and nervous system; a developing muscular skeletal system that first supports crawling, then upright posture, and finally locomotion, all within the first 40 to 50 weeks post partum. The processes whereby the newborn infant attains first the ability to crawl, then upright posture, and finally walking are central to our understanding of motor development. Beyond an understanding of how coordination and control are achieved, of equal importance is a consideration of the role that movement plays in the overall social and cognitive development of the child’s journey to maturity.

From the outset it is important to make a distinction between the forms and variety of natural biological motion and the often artificial motor skills that we need for living in our own particular environment. A constant feature of all living systems is that they move. This movement is both internal and external. Cell death and regeneration, circulation and glandular secretions are internal, and the coordination and control of action through the use of our musculoskeletal apparatus is external. Shortly after conception the closure of the ‘neural notch’ in the embryo is the precursor to the formation of the motor cortex. Thus, from the beginning of embryonic development, the primacy of movement is established. The interest of both scientists and clinicians has been focused on the change that occurs early in the infant life course (birth to early childhood), and later in life, as we transition from mature adulthood into ageing.

The general sense of development is viewed in this text in relation to movement, which is such a common and ongoing part of our daily lives that to list all movements (motor activities) for a single day would be a continuous and laborious task. We would need to begin with the movements of our fingers and the related body parts in the arm and hand in order to describe using a pen to write this list. Our list would then include movements to dress and feed ourselves, change locations, and participate in work and play activities. Specific tasks might include buttoning a shirt, tying shoelaces, shaving or applying makeup, buttering toast, using a spoon to eat soup, navigating a crowded pavement, riding a bicycle, driving a car, using a keyboard, texting, lifting a box, turning a page, playing a piano, throwing a ball and dealing cards, and many more. The corollary to this is to try and list those activities during a typical day that do not involve movement.

Our capacity to control our movements changes so that we become more accurate and faster in our responses. We also develop more precise force control to increase the range of movements that can be stronger, as well as slower and more subtle. Movements become more coordinated with fewer extraneous movements and appear to be smooth, effortless, and unhurried. A richer repertoire of movements is established to produce variable and elegant solutions to movement problems. Multiple demands can be handled in a shorter time, including the ability to relate our movements to the movements of others. We can plan ahead by knowing what others are likely to do (anticipation). Thus, movement is more than just performing the skill itself; it also involves different contexts and individuals.

What is motor development?

A short definition would be as follows: Motor development is adaptive change towards competence. We include the term adaptive change because it draws our attention to the transactional relationship between the individual and environment and, as we have noted, change occurs in many different ways. Including the term competence directs us to think of the developing child in the process of becoming something other than what he or she is at the moment. Competence conveys the meaning of a larger concern for being effective in our environment, rather than focusing on the achievement of specific skills (Connolly and Bruner 1974). These ideas are not dissimilar to the ecological psychology proposed by James Gibson (1966, 1979), which we discuss later in this chapter. Individuals and environments are seen in a transactional relationship, in which each partner changes in relation to the other. Development is different to, and yet includes, growth, with development being altogether a larger concept that encompasses multiple interacting parts both intrinsic and extrinsic to the child. In addition, learning is in part a consequence of these multiple experiences and, as such, can also be a function of and a contributor to development.

Fig. 1.1 Idealized shape of developmental change: (A) linear, (B) accelerating, (C) asymptotic, (D) step-like, (E) S-shaped, (F) variable, (G) unsystematic, (H) step climbing, (I) U-shaped, and (J) inverted U-shape.

What does change look like?

The obvious manifestations of change indicating development are the behavioural markers (‘milestones’) that historically denote the trajectory of the developing infant. For example, parents and others often note the first independent steps of their child. These recognized benchmarks often hide some of the complexities involved in the process of developmental change. Adolph et al (2008) have raised an important methodological issue: namely that, by using a broad generalized longitudinal approach or cross-sectional designs, we have missed critical points of developmental change, which have remained hidden or masked in the broad trajectories of much of the extant data. Adolph et al (2008, p. 527) comment that what we have is ‘a gallery of before and after snapshots, studio portraits of newborns, and fossilized milestones but little understanding of the process of development itself. What we need are fine-grained depictions of developmental trajectories’.

They present a graphic illustration of a hypothesized family of the developmental progressions made by a child, varying from smooth, steady-paced trajectories through abrupt step-like changes to those periods that even involve reversals (Fig. 1.1).

The depiction of change shown in Figure 1.1 suggests a multifaceted creature that displays observable behaviours that include variability, continuity, discontinuity, accelerations, and spurts. One has only to work in a classroom to see change happening (i.e. the child who makes steady and often slow but sure progress, picking up the concepts that are being presented. Contrast this with the child who appears to be somewhat disconnected yet takes a major leap forward when the ‘penny drops’). In children with atypical resources, change is often more variable, with progress in a forward direction also being accompanied by relapses and the disappearance of behaviours that were already learned.

Adolph et al (2008) argue that the variability in observed changes is a result of statistical sampling methods, which, they believe, examine only the stable endpoints in development. Only by taking more frequent and smaller sampling intervals/observations can we begin to expose such crucial events as when one stable endpoint finishes and another begins. This is a method that Vygotsky (1978) labelled ‘micro genetic’. Adolph et al (2008) proposed five guidelines for defining optimal rates of time sampling to adequately capture a true picture of the process of development:

Determine the base rate – look for the typical rate at which the skill is expressed.

Find the acquisition period – determine the approximate age range for the acquisition period.

Sample as frequently as you can – often on a daily basis.

Look before the onset – include ages that are before the observable onset.

Look for changes in variability – use of smoothing techniques.

For further elaboration of these points see Adolph et al (2008, pp. 527–543).

Characteristics and descriptions of movement

The above brief listing of guidelines reminds us that there are several considerations when defining movement. One important point is that movement often is described in functional terms, when listing actions such as buttoning and throwing. This is quite different from describing the movements harnessed to achieve the functional outcomes of buttoning a shirt and propelling a ball through the air. Movement can be described and analysed strictly as body movements or intended functions. Both levels of description are useful, though here the focus is mainly on the broader and functional aspects of movement, while including many descriptions and analyses of changes in body movements.

Another consideration is that body movements are situation specific and are required to be adjusted to the extant circumstances, such as walking carefully on an icy pavement in contrast with running full speed in a footrace. The control of movement becomes more complicated when objects and other people are involved, particularly when they are also moving.

One issue in describing movements is determining what we should use as a unit of movement. The difficulty is that every movement is really a combination of many smaller movements. For example, walking and writing are commonly identified as movements, but each is really a composite of many separate movements. We see this when watching infants walking, as they move one foot forward, followed by a pause and the movement of the other foot forward. Also, a pencil can be held in various ways to make single lines in different directions, as well as writing single letters and complete words. The point is that each movement is a combination of other movements and also may be used as a part of another movement. This means that each movement can be labelled in various ways depending on what one chooses to view as the movement unit.

A second concern is describing and analysing movement changes as either continuous or discrete. An important developmental change is the extent to which new movements are a sequence of discrete movements, such as early walking efforts, rather than the more continuous cycle in later walking. The same pattern of change from discrete to continuous is observed in using a pencil, as children initially make a number of discrete or single lines before they move the pencil more continuously. Although many body movements do need to be made continuously, others can be discrete or serial.

Performance and learning, ability and skill

When we describe movement the terms ‘performance’ and ‘learning’ are the typical terminology used. While they are often used alongside each other when talking about movement behaviour, it should be remembered that they represent different processes.

PERFORMANCE

Performance is usually described as involving motor behaviour at a particular moment in time; very often this is a one-shot occurrence and can be readily observed and measured. Thus, a nine-iron golf shot to the 17th hole on a particular day would be classed as performance. Similarly, a 4-year-old child performing a two-footed jump over a rope lying on the floor would also fit this description. Performance does not imply anything other than what one observes at that particular point in time; it says little if anything about how typical that motor behaviour is, or how permanent it is, or whether it can be repeated. Control is closely connected to the issue of performance and involves mechanisms that ensure a more or less smooth and effortless outcome.

LEARNING

Learning, like development, implies that there is a relatively permanent change in motor behaviour, but the two differ in important ways despite being intertwined in many respects. Learning is also intrinsically involved with performance. Learning involves acquiring a set of processes that are instrumental in changing motor behaviour; these processes are assumed and much effort has been expended in determining exactly what these processes are. These processes do often lead to a change in behaviour and in most cases lead to an increased capacity to perform a particular skill or set of skills. Learning typically occurs as a direct result of practice or experience; it is not the result of maturation and growth, two fundamental characteristics of the dynamic processes involved in development. Learning itself is not directly observable but is inferred by measuring performance as defined above on two or more occasions. Finally, learning is relatively permanent and is not simply a one-off occurrence that is influenced by variables such as trait anxiety, illness, motivation, or having an off day. As is often said, ‘form is temporary, class is permanent’. Or to put in our language, performance may be temporary but learning is relatively permanent. Of course there is the debate as to what exactly is relatively permanent, but we can say that, when true learning has taken place, the learner has changed in some rather permanent manner. Once you have truly learned to read, or how to ski, the ability to perform may deteriorate but the internal processes that bring about that change are relatively permanent. That does not mean you can maintain the same high standard without practice, but you rarely return to your prior state. For a more detailed review of these concepts see Schmidt and Lee (2011). These concepts are elaborated with respect to intervention in Chapter 12.

ABILITY AND SKILL

These two terms are often confused and occasionally used interchangeably. However, they are different, yet overlapping, and their respective natures have important implications when we look at development across the ability range. The term ability is usually used when referring to a capability or aptitude and is thought to be a relatively stable trait (Schmidt and Lee 2011). Abilities appear to underpin numerous skills, are possibly genetically determined, are not easily influenced by practice, and are thought to be more fundamental than the concept of skill. If we take the area of cognition as an example, intelligence would be ability, whereas reading is probably a skill. Thus, abilities underpin skills, though not in a linear one-to-one relationship; it is much more complex than that: ‘abilities represent the equipment that a person has at his or her disposal, determining whether or not a given motor task can be performed either poorly or well’ (Schmidt and Lee 2011, p. 275).

Abilities can be applied to numerous tasks; for example, the ability of strength will aid in tasks that range from simply lifting a heavy object to pushing a broken-down car to twisting a knob or pulling a lever. The ability to run fast will be of assistance in many sports, in running for a bus, and in escaping a fire. Abilities are very much involved in the concept of transfer or generalization: how the abilities that are used in the performance of one task have relevance to the performance of another.

The way in which authors such as Schmidt and Lee (2011) differentiate between skills and abilities is by describing skills as modifiable by practice and experience and abilities as relatively stable. Thus, skills become the surface outlet of the abilities that underlie them. In linguistic terms, skills would be the ‘surface structure’ and abilities the ‘deep structure’ (Chomsky 1966). It is of course more complex than this, as numerous abilities can underlie one holistic skill and numerous skills can be affected by just one ability. For an example of the former, the skill of tennis requires speed, coordination, strength, endurance, and many other abilities. For an example of the latter we have already noted that the ability of speed can underlie many skills in the sporting arena.

We have described these two concepts of ability and skill as they are of great importance in the development of movement in typical and atypical children. First, it is important to know to what degree abilities are a limiting factor. If a certain ability of a child, say with cerebral palsy, is low, how do we address that and should we be spending time working on that ability or would we look to compensatory activities? Second, and closely connected to the first, when a child has difficulties with movement should we be targeting abilities or skills? In the former there is the obvious benefit of a particular ability underpinning numerous skills, and thus if we get the intervention right, we have built transfer and generalization into our programme. The downside of this is that we are not sure, firstly, what these abilities are and what the unit of analysis might be and, secondly, whether or not they are modifiable. Teaching skills gives the advantage of directly addressing the problems the child experiences in daily life with self-care or recreational activities. The downside is that by teaching individual skills we are in danger of foregoing a chance of generalization and there is clearly insufficient time to teach every skill a child requires for adequate functioning. These issues are more fully explored in Chapter 12, in which the questions of what to measure and provide for intervention are paramount.

Consequences of movement

There are different ways to view the consequences of movement activity. The most obvious consequences are the movement outcomes themselves and we have labelled this ‘movement by design’. Here movement is the dependent variable; as in the old saying, we are learning how to move. It is labelled movement by design to illustrate that human beings are uniquely designed and have developed (evolved) over thousands of years as a species that comprises approximately 10¹² neurones, 10⁹ receptors, 10³ muscles, and 10² bones! The physical linkages (ligaments, tendons, muscles, and joints) enable the developing human biomechanical system to walk upright, reach, grasp, and explore with an almost infinite capacity to coordinate and control its motor apparatus. This permits the successful execution of numerous skilled activities that satisfy our intents, wants, and desires.

The second we have labelled ‘movement that informs’; in other words, how does a child’s growing capacity to move and explore its environment contribute to a wider understanding of the world around us? The answer to this question is directly related to our ability to communicate with others (language), solve problems, and think in abstract terms; in other words, all of the activities which we call cognition.

Movement by design

Clark and Whitall (1989) described four distinct periods of the history of motor development: the precursor period (1787–1928); the maturational period (1928–1946); the normative/descriptive period (1946–1970); and the process-orientated period (1970 to the present day). The first three periods were all essentially descriptive, but the fourth period (process orientated) is driven more by testable theory rather than mere observation and description. The fourth period has been influenced primarily by two distinct theoretical perspectives: information processing theory and the concepts of ecological psychology and dynamical systems theory.

The descriptive period

The British scientist Francis Galton (1876) noted that the study of twins might well show promise for the study of child development because twins share common genetic components.a In spite of this important insight, little substantive work on motor development was forthcoming in science until the classic studies by Arnold Gesell and Catherine Amatruda (1941) and Myrtle McGraw (1963), who compiled careful descriptive data of what they designated as different ‘stages’ of motor development. Perhaps the most famous were the studies by Myrtle McGraw in 1935 and 1939, in which she reported and discussed the effects of the training of twin males ‘Johnny and Jimmy’ (McGraw 1935), one of whom was given specific training in a variety of age-appropriate motor skills, and one who received no specific training. These early 20th-century scientists recorded the observed changes that take place from birth through the first 6 or 7 years of life. They were primarily interested in what seemed to them to be the specific stages in the motor development of the child, and from these early observations the term ‘motor milestones’ was coined. Together the work of Gesell and McGraw formed the basis of much of the clinical work that specified the benchmarks of regular, typical motor development. Their conceptual view was that these motor milestones were reached at specific points in time as a direct function of the orderly development of the central nervous system (CNS). Early developmental theorists thus concluded that brain development was the key and proposed a neuromaturational approach to motor development. This theory was based on the assumption that it was the developing neural apparatus (the brain and associated nervous system) that controlled the timing and emergence of such actions as upright stance and walking. This idea is illustrated in Figure 1.2. Here the CNS is depicted as the ‘controller’ or ‘executive’ of the motor apparatus. This viewpoint assumes that, much like a puppet, all motor behaviour is controlled by a ‘top down’ hierarchical process. This idea was not only part of the neuromaturational perspective but, as we shall see later, was central to information processing theory.

Fig. 1.2 Cartoon of ‘motor executive’ using scripts based on local terrain in order to control movement. Reproduced with permission from Michaels and Carello (1981).

During the descriptive period McGraw (1963) developed her ideas of the neuromaturational development of an infant’s motor behaviour when she proposed a four-stage description of how the initial reflex abilities of the newborn child gradually fade into the voluntary and more adaptive control capacities of the developing child. McGraw’s (1963) four-stage view of development is depicted as follows:

Stage 1 – the reflexes present in the newborn infant.

Stage 2 – the CNS develops sufficiently to inhibit these primitive reflexes.

Stage 3 – the CNS assumes more of the voluntary control of movement.

Stage 4 – the early reflexes integrate into larger movement patterns.

To illustrate her idea McGraw (1963) used the development of the palmar grasp:

Stage 1 – pressure on the palm of the newborn infant elicits reflex action of the fingers and thumb to produce the palmar grasp.

Stage 2 – (after 3–4mo) inhibition by the CNS produces extension of the fingers and thumb, and minimal response when pressure is applied to the infant’s palm.

Stage 3 – the palmar grasp is produced without the need for palmar pressure. This is illustrated when the fingers are extended in anticipation of grasping an object prior to actual contact with the object.

Stage 4 – a variety of grasping instances emerge, which are employed in a variety of situations and in combination with other movements.

McGraw’s (1963) ideas contributed to the adoption of specific periods of child development.

In a similar vein the renowned Swiss biologist Jean Piaget developed the idea of specific developmental periods when he proposed a ‘sensorimotor period’ in the developing infant, which encompassed one of his proposed developmental stages of the first 2 years of an infant’s life. During this sensorimotor or preverbal period, Piaget described in some detail his observations of infant behaviour, as the child developed an understanding of such practical information as object permanence, temporal succession, and sensorimotor causality, which Piaget argued contributed to the formation of ‘representational thought’. Here we can see how motor development is seen as a precursor to what Piaget terms representational thought. This has both a ‘good news’ aspect and a ‘bad news’ aspect. The good news is that Piaget clearly gives an important role to motor development in his overall theory of development. The bad news is that by distinguishing between motor development and later representational thought, Piaget adheres to the traditional idea of dualism: that movement (regarded as biological) is separate from abstract thinking, which is the central focus of cognitive development. Philosophically this reflects Piaget’s adherence to the traditional dualism that has dominated the psychological sciences since the time of Descartes (1596–1650): ‘cogito ergo sum’.

The contributions of early developmental theorists such as Myrtle McGraw and Jean Piaget to developmental psychology and the role of motor behaviour went largely ignored by the field of psychology. Other than Piaget’s theorizing that cognitive development emerges, in part, from the early sensorimotor stage during the first 24 months of life, only the 19th-century psychologist William James proposed a motor theory of perception (James 1890). As a consequence, the focus of child development was primarily on the abstract processes (cognition), which were regarded as separate and essentially independent from the presumed biologically influenced movement or perceptual motor abilities.

An important theme in this book focuses on the question of whether movement and action are separate, and independent, from what the mainstream psychological sciences regard as cognitive development, or whether the two are linked to reflect two dimensions of the same entity, i.e. does movement inform? With respect to motor development, the assumption of the mind–body separation, or dualism, would make it difficult for movement to inform. A more contemporary view questions dualism and argues that

The ‘mind’ is not an abstract ‘processor’ of information, and sees the ‘body’ as central to the shaping of mind. This more holistic view regards them as inseparable c.f. ‘biological brains are the control systems for biological bodies’.

(Clark 1998, p. 510)

Fig. 1.3 Changes in body proportions with age. Reproduced with permission from the publisher from Tanner (1981), as replicated from Stratz (1909).

Putting aside the philosophical underpinnings of mind–body dualism, it is important to remember that movement (action) plays an important role in the overall cognitive development of the child. The early theorists (Gesell, McGraw, and Piaget) all recognized this important fact, and were correct in giving movement a critical role in cognitive development, but were probably not fully correct in proposing that it was driven by the development of the CNS, which dictated the timing and emergence of the motor milestones – ‘motor readiness’. More contemporary research has clearly demonstrated that a child’s ability to master upright posture, walk, and subsequently actively explore his or her environment does not solely rely on a developing CNS and includes other variables such as physical growth trajectory and the accompanying increase in strength and joint development across the skeletal apparatus. For example, it is a consequence of biomechanics (the physics!) that helps to constrain children from walking in the first 7 or 8 months of life. During the first 5 or 6 months of life, the head is larger (and heavier) than the rest of the body, and the overall strength level of the developing infant is insufficient for supporting upright posture until 9 to 15 months. This fact is illustrated in Figure 1.3.

As Figure 1.3 readily depicts, during the first 30 to 36 weeks of life, the size of the infant skull decreases compared with the rest of the body. The change in skull size compared with the rest of the skeletal mass coupled with increased bone and muscle growth permits the child to attain upright posture, begin walking, and begin exploring the world. This redistribution of weight, coupled with increased strength and an optimizing of skeletal size, permits the majority of infants to commence walking between 9 and 15 months. The ability to walk is not ‘switched on’ by a CNS at some ‘critical’ point in time; rather, it is a consequence of ongoing physical development that relies on normal nutrition and the inherent phylogenetic process of the species. Achieving upright postural control and independent locomotion is an emergent phenomenon that is a consequence of the typical physical and neurological development of the infant. This directly challenges the view advanced by the early theorists.

Systems-orientated period

For this introductory chapter, we present a relatively brief overview of three theoretical ideas and orientations that have influenced the psychological sciences generally and much of the motor development and motor learning research since the late 1960s. Each of these theoretical perspectives represents contemporary explanations on how motor behaviour both develops and is formulated. They are: first, information processing; second, the Ecological Psychology of the psychologist James Gibson; and third the dynamical systems theory, the origins of which emanate from the ideas of the Russian physiologist Nicolai Bernstein. All three are further elaborated in Chapter 3 and elsewhere, but a brief outline and their influence on motor development research and thinking are provided below.

INFORMATION PROCESSING

Following on from the descriptive period of early motor development, the post-Second World War period saw the emergence of a new theoretical orientation known as information processing as a way of providing an account of human behaviour. This viewpoint emerged in the behavioural sciences in the 1960s and had its origins in the post-War work of Kenneth Craik (1948), the British scientist, as well as in the development of a theory of communication in the USA (Shannon and Weaver 1949). Research adhering to the constructs of information processing theory has had, and continues to have, an enormous influence not only in the behavioural sciences psychology but also in engineering, communications and to no less an extent the study of motor learning and control. It has remained the dominant theory in both cognitive psychology and the study of motor behaviour for 50 years and went essentially unchallenged until the mid-1980s. Information processing theory invokes a computer analogy that views the CNS as functioning as a processor of information and a control centre. The focus on motor development and child psychology was to view the developing child as a processor of information, developing an increasingly sophisticated capacity to process incoming environmental information and to interpret that information to develop appropriate responses to whatever task or circumstance were demanded of the child.

Fig. 1.4 (a) James Gibson (Google images: maquinasdefuego.blogspot.com) and (b) Nicolai Bernstein (Google images: neurotree.org).

Central to information processing theory is the assumption that information from the environment (visual, auditory, etc.) requires interpretation by an internal ‘perceptual mechanism’ in order to assign meaning, and to ensure the generation of an appropriate response. This in turn triggers the motor system to produce the appropriate action or utterance based on the assigned meaning of the perceptual system. Psychologists have used the information processing model to investigate memory capacity, picture recognition, strategic problem-solving behaviour, reaction time and a wide range of verbal tasks.

The publication of both Adams’ (1971) ‘A closed loop theory of motor learning’ and Schmidt’s (1975) ‘Schema theory’ provided a theoretical basis for a substantial body of research on both children and adults in the context of the information processing paradigm. Both the theories of Adams (1971) and Schmidt (1975) relied on the information processing assumption that skill learning and performance requires a ‘motor programme’ to initiate, organize, and execute an appropriate motor response to an environmental task demand. A more detailed treatment of the assumptions and orientation of information processing theory is presented in Chapter 3.

Both motor development and motor learning and control have been influenced by two other theoretical developments. These ideas originated from two scientists: the American psychologist James Gibson of Cornell University and the Russian physiologist Nicolai Bernstein (see Fig. 1.4).

ECOLOGICAL PSYCHOLOGY

James Gibson advanced the idea that information from the surrounding environment is directly perceived. This notion is referred to as ‘Gibson’s Ecological Psychology’ (Gibson 1979). To Gibson (1979) perception and action are not separate systems but are inextricably linked: ‘we must perceive in order to move, but we must also move in order to perceive’ (Gibson 1979, p. 223).

Both James and Eleanor Gibson went on to contribute a substantial body of knowledge, building on the premise that experience, learning, and knowledge acquisition are a function of changes in perception (Pick 1992), and to producing empirical support for the Gibson (1979) notion of affordances (Adolph et al 1993). The contributions of Eleanor Gibson with respect to motor development are discussed further in Chapter 4.

DYNAMICAL SYSTEMS THEORY

The Russian physiologist Nicolai Bernstein (1967) proposed the idea that coordination and control of movement must to a large degree be essentially self-organizing, and not reliant on the specific motor programme selected from a stored location, presumably in the CNS. This latter idea formed the theoretical basis for what is now referred to as dynamical systems theory. Bernstein’s (1967) idea that skill is self-organizing has its origins in his research produced in the 1930s but was not published in the West until 1967. This idea contributed to the theorizing that supports a dynamical systems approach to motor skill expression. The human body comprises approximately 1000 muscles and 100 bones and associated linkages that require an organizing process to execute a simple motor act. Bernstein (1967) asked how might these many degrees of freedom be controlled or constrained in order for an individual to execute a smooth and efficient action such as reaching for a glass of water? For that matter, how do we perform the many other motor skill activities of daily life? How the many degrees of freedom present in the human skeletal apparatus are constrained is referred to as ‘Bernstein’s degrees of freedom problem’. Bernstein essentially questions the notion that the CNS alone has the sole responsibility of constraining the available degrees of freedom to execute any specific task. He proposed that skilled activity must rely on ‘coordinative structures’ (a group of muscles which act synergistically as a functional unit) constrained but not controlled by the CNS. This promotes a more dynamic view of skill production and emphasizes the idea that skilled activity is self-organizing rather than reliant on motor programmes. The concept of coordinative structures is more in keeping with the idea of ‘soft assemblies’; that is to say that the CNS has a role to play in all activity, but not in a rigid programme-orientated fashion. The formulation of any motor response will be a function of the constraints of the task performer and the environment (Newell 1986). A typical illustration of this is the hand grasping study reported by Newell et al (1989), whereby infants reach with one or two hands depending on the size of the ‘to-be-grasped’ cup presented, and the cup’s scaled relationship to the hand-width aperture formed by the thumb and index finger. A fuller discussion of this study is presented in Chapter 4.

It is important to remember that the two theoretical orientations of ecological psychology and dynamical systems are not necessarily complementary; that is to say that adherence to the notion that perception is direct (from an ecological perspective) does not require an acceptance of a particular theory of coordination and control of movement. Likewise, those who promote the dynamic systems view that skill production is essentially self-organizing do not need to assume that perception is direct. It is, however, true to say that several researchers referenced in this text support both. This more natural approach to thinking about both perception and action changed both the style of inquiry and the theorizing related to motor development. The late Esther Thelen published extensively on the general idea that developmental motor skills emerge at points along the developmental trajectory, as the developing infant grows in both strength and stature, and the accompanying joint complexes stabilize (shoulder for reaching, lower limbs for both sitting and upright posture). For example, an early dynamical analysis of infant kicking (Thelen and Fisher 1983) provided empirical support that the periodicity (rhythmicity) observed in the kicking of young preambulatory infants (viewed as inconsequential and ignored by earlier theorists) was in fact directly related to the periodicity of the step reflex which young preambulatory infants exhibited when supported over a slow-moving treadmill. Up to this point no relationship was presumed to exist between infant kicking and the development of walking. Thelen and Fisher (1983) demonstrated that the progression to coordinated movement was present in the seemingly random kicking of young infants. Coordinated motor behaviour emerged from changes in the differential growth trajectory of the infant, rather than a consequence of a centrally controlled programme in the CNS. The capacity to walk was present in the design of the coordinative structures but lay dormant until growth changes in limb length and muscular strength were sufficient to support both upright stance (postural stability) and subsequent locomotion.

This more contemporary viewpoint increasingly prevalent in children’s motor development focuses on changes in motor development that are synonymous with an increase in behavioural flexibility. To better understand the motor development in children the central question to ask is ‘How is this flexibility achieved?’. Our earlier discussion about how the maturational approach to this question was addressed by early theorists involved the proposition that the CNS both controlled and timed the appearance of milestones such as upright posture and locomotion. We now know that these milestones are as much a consequence of growth changes in the infant, especially the relative size of the head and increased leg and trunk stability, which enable the child to explore opportunities to attain upright stance and locomotion. The key to motor development from both maturational and empirical evidence is that the developing child must first acquire stability in the key joint complexes required to support a specific skilled action. The research that supports this notion of increasing behavioural flexibility is presented and discussed in Chapter 4.

By way of summary, the notion of movement by design represents a musculoskeletal system that has embedded in it the potential for a range of phylogenetic motor skills that emerge as a direct result of the normal growth and development of the infant in the first 2 years of life. These skills emerge as a function of typical growth and development that assumes adequate nourishment and care, and are honed and improved by interaction with the environment. The major event in this context is the child’s ability to master upright posture and locomotion, enabling the child to change location and position and engage in manual exploration of the wider environment. Once achieved the inherent desire to explore quickly opens up immense opportunities to know the world in which the child is born. It is this opportunity to explore that informs, and we now turn to this issue.

Fig. 1.5 The interrelationships among the mover, the task, and the environment.

Movement that informs

It has long been intuitive to educators in general and especially dance and physical education teachers that movement is important – perhaps critical – to the overall development of the child. Poor coordination observed in young children is often an early warning of more general developmental problems. The ability to move efficiently can be a window on both the trajectory and quality of the child’s overall future developmental potential. These observations represent the non-experimental wisdom of experts who spend their lives observing children. As we have already noted, with the exception of the observations of Jean Piaget, much of behavioural science, with some exceptions, essentially ignored investigating the role that movement plays in overall development. By focusing on the abstract aspects of ‘mind’ the role of movement was seen as more the domain of biology, and the notion that movement might ‘inform’ cognition was disregarded. The separation of mind and body advanced in the dualism of René Descartes, the ‘godfather’ of the psychological sciences, has perpetuated this division. As we have seen, there was recognition by the early theorist that movement was important, even though this view was not widely embraced by psychologists at large; cognition was regarded more as a focus on abstract processes and less connected to movement. An important question to be addressed is whether movement should continue to be regarded as separate from overall cognitive development or whether it is an integral part of cognitive development and a necessary and sufficient condition to optimize development.

Embodied cognition

In the first edition of this text, Keogh and Sugden (1985) illustrated the hypothesized relationships among task, performer, and environment. Figure 1.5 represents the idea that any action or skilled performance must recognize the interrelationship between these three components of the performance extant at any point in time.

These interrelationships among task, performer, and environment were further elaborated by Newell (1986) and presented as a constraints perspective on motor skill acquisition. Any discussion or theorizing about a movement skill or activity must consider this dynamic, tripartite relationship. Gibson (1979) noted that behaviour is regular but not regulated, implying that our motor actions exhibit both stability and flexibility, but these activities are not rigid or stereotypical and have the capacity to be adaptive. This contemporary view of motor development promotes the important coupling relationship between perception and action that contributes to the development of behavioural flexibility in the growing child, which in turn promotes the child’s overall cognitive and intellectual development. This embodiment of the relationship between action and cognition has been referred to by Warren (2006) as ‘enactive knowledge’, that is non-symbolic information grounded in the act of doing. The idea that intelligence emerges from the interaction of the actor and the environment as a consequence of sensory motor activity is now generally referred to as embodied cognition.

To better understand how action or movement is viewed within a larger developmental context, we examine in Chapter 4 how the work of the ecological psychologist Eleanor ‘Jackie’ Gibson (of visual cliff fame and wife of James Gibson) and the research of the late Esther Thelen and her colleague Beverly Ulrich (Thelen and Ulrich 1991, Thelen 1995), and others, contribute to the notion that argues for a closer relationship between actions and how action enables the development of what we term ‘behavioural flexibility’, and how behavioural flexibility is a key contributor to overall cognitive development. Embodied cognition is, in a very real sense, synonymous with the idea of behavioural flexibility:

The central idea behind the embodiment hypothesis is that intelligence emerges in the interaction of an agent with an environment and as a result of sensorimotor activity. This view stands in opposition to more traditional notions of internal representation and computation and in general has had little to say about symbols, symbolic reasoning, and language… We argue that starting as a baby grounded in a physical, social, and linguistic world is crucial to the development of the flexible and inventive intelligence that characterizes humankind.

(Smith and Gasser 2005, p. 13)

The above quote captures the relationship between embodiment and behavioural flexibility.

Motor development research in the 21st century will promote and investigate how the growing child will acquire the motor skills needed for daily living, play, recreation, and work. We predict that the theoretical orientations of both ecological psychology and dynamical systems theory will produce an upward trajectory of empirical support. This textbook traces not only the history of how scientists have described the observed changes that children exhibit in their movement behaviour but also the conceptual ways in which these changes might be explained. We do not think about movement behaviour as separate from the overall development; we promote the idea that movement behaviour is an integral part of both cognitive and social development. This is perhaps best captured in the following quote by Port and van Gelder (1995):

Cognitive processes span the brain, the body, and the environment; to understand cognition is to understand the interplay of all three. Inner reasoning processes are no more essentially cognitive than the skillful execution of cognitive movement or the nature of the environment in which cognition takes place. The interaction between ‘inner processes’ and outer world is not peripheral to cognition, it is the very stuff of which cognition is made

(Port and van Gelder 1995, p. ix)

The trinity proposed by Port and van Gelder (1995) – brain, body, and environment – shares an obvious parallel to the task-mover and environment proposed earlier by Keogh and Sugden (1985, see Fig. 1.5). Rather than adhering to a rigid separation between motor development and the traditional abstract idea of cognition, contemporary theory embraces the role of movement experiences as a critical feature of overall cognitive development.

Paradigms in cognitive science over much of the last four decades relied primarily on a machine (computer) analogy for studying such things as memory, perception, and verbal learning, and showed little interest in the influence of movement skill. As we have already noted above, this was owing largely to the influence of dualism (mind–body separation), originally proposed by René Descartes. As a consequence, theorizing in cognition has been more concerned with abstract representational phenomena, typically regarded as more difficult to study, whereas motor development and motor skills were regarded as external to this abstract (internal) world of the mind. To many in the psychological sciences, motor skills appeared both mechanistic and somewhat simplistic compared with the abstract process of thinking, seen as the ‘true’ cognitive science. Any consideration of an interaction between cognition (entirely endogenous phenomena) and sensorimotor coordination was simply ignored. When faced with providing a parsimonious account of addressing something such as Bernstein’s ‘degrees of freedom problem’, serious difficulties occur with a computational approach. Developing computational symbolic logic for the complex movements of sensorimotor output is a challenge that for many in cognitive science is simply ignored. The science of robotics while successful to some degree in building a ‘human-like’ robot the simulation of adaptable human locomotion is still an as yet unmet goal.

Developing adaptable motor control

Remembering the task–mover–environment triangle depicted in Figure 1.5, growing infants must develop flexibility in their motor activities because the possibilities for action are always changing. Research by Adolph (2005) has demonstrated this dramatically. Earlier we introduced the idea of an affordance as part of Gibson’s (1979) theory of direct perception with an affordance being an opportunity for action, which provides information about action possibilities available to the child. Adolph’s (2005) research examined affordance thresholds in developing infants to find the go/no-go decision point. When observing young infants walking down a slope, as the angle of the slope increased the infants decided to slide or crawl down rather than walk, again demonstrating movement flexibility and evidence of what Adolph (2005) refers to as an affordance threshold. The threshold thus dictates the motor decision. In the situation above, the affordance is perceived by the infant as a success/failure decision that dictates whether to walk or slide down the incline.

Development generates new perception/action opportunities that improve the infant’s behavioural flexibility to respond successfully to an ever-increasing array of motor responses and the context in which they must be performed. Adolph (2005) sees this as not dissimilar to the ‘learning to learn’ idea first proposed by Harlow (1949). Harlow (1949) promoted the idea of learning sets; that is to say, learners acquire a range of flexible, exploratory behaviours, rather than a specific associative response. Thus, solutions to a particular novel problem could be solved in several ways depending on the conditions extant at any particular moment in time. This in effect is what we refer to as motor equivalence: ‘experienced walkers displayed alternative locomotor strategies for coping with risky slopes’ (Adolph and Berger 2006, p. 196).

The contemporary approach for explaining the development of motor abilities in children implies a strong link between motor abilities and the general cognitive development of the child. No longer are the two (motor vs cognitive) regarded as separate; there is now substantial empirical evidence to support this perception–action, cognition–action synergy. Now referred to as ‘embodied cognition’, movement experiences enrich the overall cognitive development of the child by providing ‘kinesiological epistemology’ (Stoffregen TA, University of Minnesota, personal communication, June 2010). As the developing infant progresses from sitting to crawling, to cruising, and ultimately to walking, each is now regarded as a separate postural state that requires separate motor actions, which do not necessarily transfer to the next developmental state. Infants do, however, build a repertoire of actions in each of the earlier postural states through which they have passed and this provides an ever-increasing range of response flexibility, which can be called upon when novel motor problems are encountered in the environment.

Summary

Treating mind and body as separate entities is losing its appeal as more and more research demonstrates that action (movement) and cognition develop together – they are ‘embodied’. The research we have highlighted in this opening chapter demonstrates this important developmental connection. The progression of motor abilities goes hand in hand with the development of the infants’ capacity to ‘know’ about the world at large. Action and thinking are complementary to each other, and the great majority of movement activity is guided by perception, from newborn infants who turn to look at sounds and respond to a turning mobile to the elderly who use body sway to stabilize vision. Being born with the ability to explore and to seek out information about the world produces knowledge that is both flexible and adaptive. When 5 months old, infants know how far they can reach; by 14 months infants know which slopes they can safely walk down. Experience appears to be more important than chronological age; Campos et al (2000), in a lengthy review of the converging research on the impact of self-generated locomotion entitled ‘Travel Broadens the Mind’, comment as follows:

So, locomotor experience has effects that can be enduring, even though they are not necessarily predictive of the future; locomotor experience can also explain developmental transitions, even though it cannot determine them; and locomotor experience dramatically changes the relation of the person to that person’s environment.

(Campos et al 2000, p. 211)

Our brain develops as a consequence of genetics, but genes do not totally determine its structure or function. Genes make the brain flexible; it is designed to be flexible in order to respond to experience. As we have emphasized in this introductory chapter, physical development, brain development, and experience are all important, but the latter, experience via exploration, is paramount in development. Self-generated movement (exploration) is the critical factor in an infant’s ability to acquire knowledge about the wider environment and his or her relationship to the objects and things, living and inanimate, that make up our world.

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Footnote

a Galton’s study is reported in Francis Galton, ‘The history of twins, as a criterion of the relative powers of nature and nurture’, first published in Fraser’s Magazine (1875), 12: 566–76 and reprinted with revisions in Journal of the Anthropological Institute (1875), 5: 391–406.

2

BIOLOGICAL INFLUENCES ON DEVELOPMENTAL CHANGE

In Chapter 1 children’s movement development was described as an adaptive change that occurs as the child progresses towards maturity. This was shown in a dynamic model that portrayed the interplay between the child’s resources, the environment in which the activity takes place, and the nature and presentation of the task. The child’s resources are a crucial part of this interplay and this chapter examines some of the fundamental biological influences, detailing selected changes in