An action perspective on motor development

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2004.04.002Get rights and content

Abstract

Motor development has all too often been considered as a set of milestones with little significance for the psychology of the child. Nothing could be more wrong. From an action perspective, motor development is at the heart of development and reflects all its different aspects, including perception, planning and motivation. Recent converging evidence demonstrates that, from birth onwards, children are agents who act on the world. Even in the newborn child, their movements are never just reflexes. On the contrary, they are purposeful goal-directed actions that foresee events in the world. Thus, motor development is not just a question of gaining control over muscles; equally important are questions such as why a particular movement is made, how the movements are planned, and how they anticipate what is going to happen next.

Section snippets

Neonatal actions

Actions are fundamentally different from reflexes. According to Sherrington, a reflex is a hardwired sensorimotor loop organized at a spinal or para-spinal level. Reflexes are not goal-directed or driven by motivation. Although reflexes can serve important functions for the subject, they are stereotyped, elicited, and automatic. The movements of newborn infants have traditionally been described as reflexes. Converging evidence, however, shows that most neonatal behaviours are prospective and

The development of action

Action systems do not appear ready-made. Neither are they primarily determined by experience. They are the result of a process with two foci, one in the central nervous system and one in the subject's dynamic interactions with the environment. The brain undoubtedly has its own dynamics that makes neurons proliferate, migrate and differentiate in certain ways and at certain times. However, the emerging action capabilities are also crucially shaped by the subject's interactions with the

The importance of motivation

Internally generated motives are crucial for the formation of new behaviour and the maintenance of established behaviour patterns [34]. For example, before infants master reaching, they spend hours and hours trying to get the hand to an object in spite of the fact that they will fail, at least to begin with. For the same reason, children abandon established patterns of behaviour in favour of new ones. For instance, infants often try to walk at an age when they can locomote much more efficiently

Anticipating one's own actions

If mastery of actions relies on the perception and knowledge of upcoming events, then the development of actions has to do with acquiring systems for handling such information. It has to do with anticipating both one's own posture and movements, and future events in the world. For every mode of action that develops, new prospective problems of movement construction arise and it takes time to acquire ways to solve them. At the onset of functional reaching, infants approach the goal in a series

Development of brain mechanisms involved in action control

Because predictive control is such an important aspect of action, several parts of the brain are engaged in solving such problems. On the sensory side, it is evident that the visual system compensates for transmission delays [53]. The cortical MT/MST area is important because it provides information about motion and change (e.g. of size and form). The emergence of smooth-pursuit eye movements (Box 2) and sensitivity to motion direction [44] indicate that this area is functional at around 2

Conclusions

The basic insight that movements are organized as actions has important consequences, not only for the understanding of motor development, but also for the understanding of other aspects of development. Perceptual development is determined by the action capabilities of the child and what objects and events afford in the context of those actions [36]. Cognitive development has to do with expanding prospective control over and above the information available at any point in time by using rules

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