THE DYNAMIC SYSTEMS VIEW

 THE DYNAMIC SYSTEMS VIEW

Arnold Gesell (1934) 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 showed that motor development comes about through the unfolding of a genetic plan, or maturation.

Later studies demonstrated that the sequence of developmental milestones is not as fixed as Gesell indicated and not due as much to heredity as Gesell argued. In the last two decades, the study of motor development experienced a renaissance as psychologists developed new insights about how motor skills develop. One increasingly influential theory is dynamic systems theory, proposed by Esther Thelen.

According to dynamic systems theory, infants assemble motor skills for perceiving and acting. Notice that perception and action are coupled, according to this theory. 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 solutions to the infant’s goals.

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.

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. Nature and nurture, the infant and the environment, are all working together as part of an ever-changing system.