Action

Actions Change Throughout Development

The way people act fundamentally changes throughout their lives. Actions are the result of an interaction between individual’s bodies and the environmental conditions, and as their bodies and brains transform over time, so too do their actions. The most obvious changes occur during childhood and concern gross and fine motor skills. In just a couple of years, children go from struggling to hold their head in a stable position to riding a bike and from a first reach toward an object to being able to play the piano.

If one were to watch a newborn baby as she is lying awake in her crib, one would observe plenty of movements, but the vast majority of them would appear to be erratic and uncontrolled. A large part of this motility is indeed caused by spontaneous activity of the baby’s central nervous system. Yet this spontaneous activity provides the practice and the earliest basis for goal-directed actions. Infants experience the consequences of their spontaneous movements and begin to form associations between actions and their effects.

A young child might, for instance, first hit a mobile above her by accident but still form an association between her kicking action and the fascinating movement of the mobile. Subsequently, she might try to intentionally create the effect again. Thus, the first goal-directed actions emerge early in development: Even newborns have been shown to make arm movements toward a desired object, although they are clumsy and not yet well controlled.

Also, actions are characterized by some level of prospective control from early on. The environments people act in are diverse and change over [Page 21]time, which renders prospective actions—actions that take into account the future situation yet to evolve—most adaptive. The first seeds of prospective control are already present in infancy; for instance, 4-month-old babies can reach for and get a hold of moving objects by moving their hand to an anticipated object location.

As development progresses, young children become able to plan entire sequences of actions aimed at achieving a goal. This is evident first in the emergence of means–end actions by the end of the first year of life. In these instances, infants must first act on an intermediary to then attain a goal object, such as by pulling a cloth to retrieve a toy that is lying on it.

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