Development as a dynamic system

https://doi.org/10.1016/S1364-6613(03)00156-6Get rights and content

Abstract

Development is about creating something more from something less, for example, a walking and talking toddler from a helpless infant. One current theoretical framework views the developmental process as a change within a complex dynamic system. Development is seen as the emergent product of many decentralized and local interactions that occur in real time. We examine how studying the multicausality of real-time processes could be the key to understanding change over developmental time. We specifically consider recent research and theory on perseverative reaching by infants as a case study that demonstrates this approach.

Section snippets

Development as a dynamic system

The idea of emergence – the coming into existence of new forms through ongoing processes intrinsic to the system – are not new to developmental psychology. Developmental theorists such as Kuo, Oyama and Gottlieb have long emphasized the probabilistic, epigenetic nature of ontogenetic processes. Biologists and psychologists such as Waddington, von Bertalanffy, Lewin and Gesell have envisioned behaviour and development as morphogenetic fields that unify multiple, underlying components. But only

Multicausality

The first assumption of the dynamic approach is that developing organisms are complex systems composed of very many individual elements embedded within, and open to, a complex environment. As in many other complex systems in nature, such systems can exhibit coherent behaviour: the parts are coordinated without an executive agent or a programme that produces the organized pattern. Rather, the coherence is generated solely in the relationships between the organic components and the constraints

Nested timescales

The second key assumption of the dynamics systems approach is that behavioural change occurs over different timescales. Neural excitation, for example, happens in milliseconds. Reaction times are of the order of hundreds of milliseconds. People learn skills after hours, days and months of practice. Developmental change occurs over weeks, months and years, and evolution over a much longer time period. Traditionally, psychologists have considered action, learning, development and evolution as

The A-not-B error

We present an example of how we have used the dynamic concepts of multicausality and nested time to revisit a classic issue in developmental psychology. The question originally posed by Piaget [19] was ‘when do infants acquire the concept of object permanence?’ He devised a simple object-hiding task, which has been adopted by several generations of researchers. The experimenter hides a tantalizing toy under a lid at location A and the infant reaches for the toy. This A-location trial is

Task dynamics

The dynamic field simulates the decisions of infants to reach to location A or B by integrating, over time, the various influences on that decision. The field model is neurally inspired, of the type described and characterized analytically by Amari [27], but it is abstract and not anatomically specific. The model has a one-dimensional activation field, defining a parameter space of potential activation states (in this case the locations of targets A and B). Inputs are represented by their

Developmental dynamics

The A-not-B error has been important to developmental theory because it is tightly linked to a few months in infancy. However, the neural field model suggests that the dynamics that create the error in infants are basic processes involved in goal-directed actions at all ages. Indeed, by changing the task, researchers can make perseverative errors come and go in older children and adults, just as in infants. Recently, Spencer and colleagues [30] invented an A-not-B task that was suitable for

Implications of a dynamic approach

A dynamic systems theory of development helps to resolve an apparent theoretical contradiction. At a very global level, the constraints imposed by our biological heritage and by the similarities in human environments seem to result in similar developmental outcomes. All intact human infants learn to walk, to progress from making the A-not-B error to not making it, to speak their native language and to form intense social relationships. But when one looks at the details of development, the

Conclusion

The major problem for a theory of development is to explain how to get something more from something less. At multiple levels of analysis at multiple timescales, many components open to influence from the external world interact and in so doing yield coherent higher-order behavioural forms that then feedback on the system, and change that system. In human development, every neural event, every reach, every smile and every social encounter sets the stage for the next and the real-time causal

References (38)

  • M.D. Lewis et al.

    Emotion, Development, and Self-Organization: Dynamic Systems Approaches to Emotional Development

    (2000)
  • J. Elman

    Rethinking Innateness: A Connectionist Perspective on Development

    (1996)
  • H.L.J. van der Maas et al.

    Stage-wise cognitive development: an application of catastrophe theory

    Psychol. Rev.

    (1992)
  • K.W. Fischer et al.

    Dynamic development of psychological structures in action and thought

  • Courage, M. and Howe, L. From infant to child: the dynamics of cognitive change in the second year of life. Psychol....
  • L. Gerhskoff-Stowe

    Object naming, vocabulary growth, and the development of word retrieval abilities

    J. Mem. Lang.

    (2002)
  • L. Gogate

    The intersensory origins of word comprehension: an ecological–dynamic systems view

    Dev. Sci.

    (2001)
  • B. MacWhinney

    The Emergence of Language

    (1999)
  • A. Fogel

    Systems, attachment, and relationships

    Hum. Dev.

    (2000)
  • Cited by (625)

    View all citing articles on Scopus
    View full text