GEOG 2500 Chapter Chapter 5: Chapter 5
28 May 2023
School
Department
Course
Professor
1 Motor
Development
THE DYNAMIC
SYSTEMS VIEW
Developmentalist Arnold Gesell (1934) thought his painstaking observations had
revealed how people develop their motor skills. He had discovered that infants
and children develop rolling, sitting, standing, and other motor skills in a fixed
order and within specific time frames. These observations, said Gesell, show that
motor development comes about through the unfolding of a genetic plan, or
maturation.
The experiences of the first three
years of life are almost entirely lost
to us, and when we attempt to
enter into a small child’s world, we
come as foreigners who have
forgotten the landscape and no
longer speak the native tongue.
—Selma Fraiberg
Developmentalist and Child Advocate, 20th Century
Later studies, however, demonstrated that the sequence of developmental
milestones is not as fixed as Gesell indicated and not due as much to heredity as
Gesell argued (Adolph, 2018; Adolph & Hoch, 2019). In the past two decades, the
study of motor development experienced a renaissance as psychologists
developed new insights about how motor skills develop (Adolph, 2018; Adolph &
Hoch, 2019). One increasingly influential perspective is dynamic systems theory,
proposed by Esther Thelen (Thelen & Smith, 1998, 2006).
According to dynamic systems theory, infants assemble motor skills for
perceiving and acting (Thelen & Smith, 2006). To develop motor skills, infants
must perceive something in the environment that motivates them to act and then
use their perceptions to fine-tune their movements. Motor skills represent
pathways to the infant’s goals (Adolph, 2018; Adolph & Hoch, 2019).
How is a motor skill developed, according to this theory? When infants are
motivated to do something, they might create a new motor behavior. The new
behavior is the result of many converging factors: the development of the nervous
system, the body’s physical properties and its possibilities for movement, the goal
the child is motivated to reach, and the environmental support for the skill. For
example, babies learn to walk only when maturation of the nervous system allows
them to control certain leg muscles, when their legs have grown enough to
support their weight, and when they want to move.
Mastering a motor skill requires the infant’s active efforts to coordinate several
components of the skill. Infants explore and select possible solutions to the
demands of a new task; they assemble adaptive patterns by modifying their
current movement patterns. The first step occurs when the infant is motivated by
a new challenge—such as the desire to cross a room—and gets into the “ballpark”
of the task demands by taking a couple of stumbling steps. Then the infant
“tunes” these movements to make them smoother and more effective. The tuning
is achieved through repeated cycles of action and perception of the consequences
of that action. According to the dynamic systems view, even universal milestones,
such as crawling, reaching, and walking, are learned through this process of
adaptation: Infants modulate their movement patterns to fit a new task by
exploring and selecting possible configurations (Adolph, 2018; Comalli, Persand,
& Adolph, 2017; Hoch, O’Grady, & Adolph, 2019).Page 159
To see how dynamic systems theory explains motor behavior, imagine that you
offer a new toy to a baby named Gabriel (Thelen & others, 1993). There is no
exact program that can tell Gabriel ahead of time how to move his arm and hand
and fingers to grasp the toy. Gabriel must adapt to his goal—grasping the toy—
and the context. From his sitting position, he must make split-second
adjustments to extend his arm, holding his body steady so that his arm and torso
don’t plow into the toy. Muscles in his arm and shoulder contract and stretch in a
host of combinations, exerting a variety of forces. He improvises a way to reach
out with one arm and wrap his fingers around the toy.
Thus, according to dynamic systems theory, motor development is not a passive
process in which genes dictate the unfolding of a sequence of skills over time.
Rather, the infant actively puts together a skill to achieve a goal within the
constraints set by the infant’s body and environment (Adolph, 2018; Adolph &
Hoch, 2019; Kyvelidou & Stergiou, 2019). Nature and nurture, the infant and the
environment, are all working together as part of an ever-changing system (Van
Hooren, Meijer, & McCrum, 2019).
Recently, Karen Adolph and Justine Hoch (2019) described four key aspects that
reflect the dynamic systems theory of motor development: (1) embodied, (2)
embedded, (3) enculturated, and (4) enabling.
How might dynamic systems theory explain the development of learning to walk?
Vitalinka/Shutterstock
● Motor Development Is Embodied. Opportunities for motor
behavior involve the current status of a child’s body. Changes in
infants’ bodies modify the nature of their motor behavior.
Walking is a good example of motor behavior being embodied.
Over weeks and months of walking experiences, infants improve
their walking skills. Initially, they walk very slowly in halting,
inconsistent ways and have poor balance. With extensive
experiences, they walk faster, their steps become more
consistent, and they have much better balance. Their changing
body interacts with experiences and opportunities to walk as
they physically grow.
● Motor Development Is Embedded. Environmental circumstances
can facilitate or restrict possibilities for motor behavior. Motor
behavior occurs in a physical environment and a changing world.
Variations in the environment require infants to be flexible and
adapt to these changing circumstances. As they encounter steep
slopes, narrow passageways, stairs, and many other variations in
