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Motor System, Development of

Motor development involves advances in behavior across the entire body—the eyes and head for looking, the trunk for maintaining a stable postural base, the arms and hands for manual actions, and the limbs for locomotion. Development entails increasing coordination between active muscle forces and passive gravitational and inertial forces. However, there is more to the study of motor development than muscles and biomechanics. Goal-directed movement is inextricably linked with perception, cognition, and social interaction, and motor skill acquisition includes developmental changes in all of these domains. This entry summarizes four critical aspects of motor development: Movement is ubiquitous, prospective, creative, and malleable.

Movement is Ubiquitous

Movement is the most pervasive and fundamental of all psychological activity. The body is constantly in motion. Some movements occur in the background (breathing, swallowing, postural compensations), some are spontaneous by-products of arousal and brain activity (twitches, shakes, flails), and some are goal-directed (looking, talking, reaching, walking). The massive amounts and variety of children's motor experiences facilitate discovery of new skills and their improvement. New forms of movement also set the stage for changes in other psychological domains by creating new opportunities to explore the environment and engage in social interactions. Movements in the face and throat make possible behaviors that are fundamental for life, such as sucking, chewing, and swallowing; those required to produce speech are among the most sophisticated movements learned by humans.

The first self-produced movements occur prenatally. Fetuses nod and turn their heads, open and close their jaws, yawn, suck, and swallow amniotic fluid. They wrinkle their foreheads, move their lips and tongue, and, after 25 weeks, open and close their eyes. Whole body movements and large movements of the arms and legs peak at 14 to 16 weeks postconception, then decrease as the growing body fills the uterine space. Some fetal movements are not random: Fetuses direct hand movements toward their own faces and bodies, the wall of the uterus, and the umbilical cord.

The sheer amount of movement is staggering. By 3.5 months of age, infants have performed 3 to 6 million eye movements. By 10 months, infants have accumulated enough crawling steps to travel more than half the length of Manhattan. By 12 months, infants have experienced over 110,000 bouts of wiggles, waves, kicks, and flaps of 47 different types of spontaneous stereotypies. At 14 months of age, infants take about 15,000 walking steps per day. Sleep does not quiet newborns’ active bodies. While sleeping, they stretch, roll, wave, and twitch.

Actions are Prospective

For motor actions to be adaptive, they must be controlled prospectively—guided into the future based on perceptual information about the body and environment. Even the simplest movements of the head and limbs require anticipation of disruptions to a stable postural base. Perceptual feedback from just prior movements informs the consequences of future actions.

Infants’ earliest actions show inklings of prospectivity. At 1 month of age, infants predict the trajectory of a moving target and smoothly follow it with their eyes, but prospective control is fragile and easily disrupted. The target must be large and slow moving or eye movements will lag behind. The development of prospective looking is protracted over several months. By 4 to 5 months of age, predictive looking is sufficiently stable for infants to track targets moving behind an occluder, so that their eyes wait on the far side to spot the target when it reappears.

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