Development of Movement Coordination in Children

Applications in the Field of Ergonomics, Health Sciences and Sport

Geert Savelsbergh, Keith Davids, John van der Kamp, Simon J. Bennett

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135131722
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medicine
• Subtopic: Sports Medicine

Co-ordination of movement plays a key role in human development and is an important area in sport and health sciences. This book looks in detail at how children develop basic skills, such as walking and reaching for objects, and more complex skills such as throwing and catching a ball accurately or riding a bicycle.

Development of Movement Co-ordination in Children is informed by five major theoretical perspectives and are explained in an introductory chapter:

* neural maturation
* information processing
* direct perception
* dynamic systems
* constraint theory.

The international contributions are brought together under the headings of ergonomics, health sciences and sport. Focusing on practical applications, individual chapters cover many different aspects of movement behaviour and development, ranging from children's over-estimation of their physical abilities and the links to injury proneness, to the co-ordination of kicking techniques. Both normal and abnormal development is considered.

This text will be of considerable interest to students, teachers and professionals in the fields of sport science, kinesiology, physical education, ergonomics and developmental psychology.

1 Theoretical perspectives on the development of movement co-ordination in children

Geert Savelsbergh, Keith Davids, John van der Kamp and Simon J. Bennett

1. Introduction

In a great diversity of daily activities children demonstrate skilled and well coordinated movement behaviour. To reach such levels of performance and flexibility takes years of learning and development. This book deals with the development of movement co-ordination of daily activities, like throwing, writing, reaching, walking, catching, kicking and cycling. An important characteristic of skilled performance is the ability to adjust the movement pattern to the (changing) circumstances of the environment.

Nikolai Bernstein (1967) formulated one of the central issues in understanding the development of motor co-ordination: the ‘degrees of freedom’ problem. The degrees of freedom problem refers to the possible movements of all the components (e.g. muscles, tendons, joints etc.) of the motor apparatus of the human body. Bernstein realised that the non-linear nature of the interactions among these different components of the human body makes their separate regulation impossible and inferred that to be able to control all these components, or degrees of freedom, these movements have to be co-ordinated. Co-ordination, therefore, is the process of mastering the redundant degrees of freedom into a controllable system (see Bernstein, 1967, p. 127).

The issue of mastering the degrees of freedom has been approached in different ways. In this chapter we will discuss five major perspectives, that is, the neural-maturation perspective; information-processing theories, the ecological psychological approach, dynamic systems theory and the constraint theory.

2. Neural-maturation perspective

Achievements in motor behaviour, such as grasping, sitting, crawling and walking, were believed to occur at a predetermined age. This resulted in a perspective of motor development as a rather rigid and gradual unfolding of postures and movements that was mainly attributed to the general process of maturation of the central nervous system. Co-ordinative movement patterns emerge in an orderly genetic sequence; that is, in cephalo-to-caudal and central-to-distal sequences. By an increasing cortical control over lower reflexes the movement patterns became more co-ordinated. For instance Peiper (1963) argued that basic motor skills, like walking, were not learned by experience but simply a result of cerebral maturation. In his book he used the example of a 6-month-old girl with a bilateral congenital hip dislocation. She was put into a plaster cast until 18 months and was unable to stand. At 18 months the cast was replaced by a half cast, and one day later, she started to walk (Peiper, 1963, p. 233). This example illustrates nicely the core idea of this approach.

The major contribution to the understanding of the development of movement co-ordination was the establishment of the so-called ‘milestones’ of development by Gesell (e.g. Gesell and Amatruda, 1945) and McGraw (1943). Gesell and Amatruda (1945, p. 20) suggested that ‘maturation is the net sum of the gene effects operating in a self-limited time cycle’. In the same time period, McGraw argued that motor development is possible if ‘a certain amount of neural maturation must take place before any function can be modified by specific stimulation’. This is not a strict neural-maturation point of view and leaves room for environmental influence. In the more recent constraint-led approach, the maturation of the nervous system can be considered as one of the constraints

3. Information-processing approach

The basic idea of the information-processing perspective is that it divides the cognitive system (e.g. the central nervous system) into components and determines the way in which these components process and transform information. In this respect the computer is often used as a model for the brain. The concept of memory is important as the approach emphasises representations for the storage of information. Differences between novices and experts are attributed to differences in stored knowledge with respect to the task at hand, and the associated processing activities. When a skill is learned the suggestion is that the person acquires and stores increasingly complex knowledge about that skill. The differences between experts and novices result from the use of different strategies and informational cues; that is, an expert acquires a variety of problem-solving strategies. From this perspective, children are initially regarded as novices, who then ‘move’ to expert status as they develop. Thus, development involves improving the strategies for encoding and manipulating information. Two types of model influence and dominate the development of movement co-ordination: the closed- and open-loop models.

The closed- and open-loop models (e.g. Adams, 1971; Miller et al., 1960) had their heydays in the 1960s and 1970s. In these models, feedback loops for error corrections or a feed-forward mechanism, respectively, were invoked for explaining the control and co-ordination of the motor behaviour, but were not often subjected to developmental questions. However, there are a few noticeable exceptions such as Bruner (1970) and Connolly (1970), who promoted closed-loop models. Development was considered as learning to sequence (or programme) the different parts of an action. For instance, when grasping a toy, the infant has to learn that (s)he should reach first. However, at that time, most developmental researchers were primarily concerned with constructing motor tests and gathering normative data (e.g. Cratty, 1970; Wickstrom, 1977; Williams, 1983). As a result most studies were descriptive and a theoretical framework to explain the origin of new motor behaviours was missing, which of course was not very stimulating for the study of motor development (Netelenbos and Koops, 1988; Wade, 1977).

4. The coupling of perception and action: a direct perception perspective

Gibson's (1979) ecological psychology approach to perception is also known as the direct perception perspective. The word ‘direct’ refers to the fact that objects, places and events in the environment can be perceived without the need for cognitive mediation to make perception meaningful, such as in the information-processing approach. Information in the environment is not static in time and space, but specifies events, places and objects. The child has to learn to pick up and select the appropriate information, not how to interpret or construct meaningful perception from stimuli. Therefore, whenever an infant or child has learned to (actively) pick up the information, (s)he perceives events and not some kind of discrete stimulus. This concept of information is closely related to the concept of affordances.

An affordance expresses the relation between perceiving and acting:

The affordances of the environment are what it offers the animal, what it provides or furnishes, either for good or ill. The verb to afford is found in the dictionary, but the noun affordance is not. I have made it up. I mean by it something that refers to both the environment and the animal in a way that no existing term does. It implies the complementarity of the animal and the environment.

(Gibson, 1979, p. 127)

Affordances relate to possibilities for action for an organism in a particular environment. Therefore, they relate to the perceiver's own potential action system. For example, for an actor who wants to climb stairs, the co-ordination pattern is specified by the ratio between the tread height (action space) and the actor's leg length (metric of the actor) (Warren, 1984). In more general terms, perceiving and acting are guided by body-scaled ratios, which should be similar over individual differences in body dimensions. Henceforth, developmental changes due to physical growth should not affect the perception of affordances; that is, during development children should remain tuned to similar body-scaled ratios without the need for new learning or reorganisation of the action system (Pufall and Dunbar, 1992; Van der Kamp, Savelsbergh and Davis, 1998).

Within this perspective, Van der Kamp et al. (1998) examined how children aged 5, 7 and 9 years reach, grasp and lift cardboard cubes of different sizes (ranging from 2.2 to 16.2 cm in diameter). Recordings were analysed and scored qualitatively for the percentage occurrence of one-handed grasps. The findings showed that the older the child, the higher the occurrence of one-handed grasps (37 per cent, 46 percent, and 55 per cent for the 5-, 7- and 9-year-olds respectively). Moreover, the older the child, the larger the cubes that were predominantly taken with one hand. From a direct perception approach, it is hypothesised that the detected differences in grasping behaviour between the age groups are due to the increase of hand size with age. Therefore, the observed differences in prehension should disappear when hand size is taken into account. When hand size was scaled to cube size, differences in prehension between the three age groups disappeared and the shift from one-handed to two-handed grasping occurred at the same body-scale ratio between cube size and hand span for all three age groups. In sum, the children perceived the affordances for action.

According to E. Gibson (1988) affordances have to be discovered with the aid of the perceptual systems and exploratory behaviour. Michaels and Carello (1981) stress the active nature of the exploratory behaviour:

Exploration (attention) is not an unconscious shifting-through and subsequent rejection of most inputs: It is directed control of what will be detected.

(Michaels and Carello, 1981, p. 70)

In the eyes of these authors exploration is an active and directed process which reveals affordances, as illustrated by an experiment carried out by Karen Adolph and co-workers (Adolph et al., 1993). In their study walkers and crawlers were encouraged to ascend and descend a sloping walkway of 10, 20, 30 and 40 degrees. The findings showed a relation between the exploratory activities and locomotion ability. For instance, on descending trials walkers switched from walking to sliding. Also they touched and hesitated most before descending 10- and 20-degree slopes and explored alternative means for descent by testing different sliding positions before leaving the platform. Crawlers hesitated most before descending 30- and 40-degree slopes and did not test alternative sliding positions. The experiment demonstrated the relation between infant locomotion capability, the perception of affordances (traversable by walking or not) and the exploratory activity.

The theory of direct perception offers insights into developmental perceptual-motor processes by studying learning in the context of development. What is learned is the detection of affordances; that is, what action possibilities the environment affords for the child. In this respect, learning to move and to co-ordinate one's actions involves learning to select the appropriate information sources. Moreover, this learning depends on the present action capabilities of the child. These action capabilities may improve by the maturation of the central nervous system, the sensitivity to certain information sources, the growth of body dimensions and the ability to couple information and movements. It is through the active and directed exploration of the environment with his/her own action system that the child learns to detect affordances, pick up the relevant information, and to couple the information to movements.

5. Dynamic systems approach to the development of co-ordination

Within the last decade, there has been an increase in empirical evidence that developmental processes are not smooth and monotonic, but can be characterised by phenomena such as discontinuities, transitions, instabilities, and regressions (Savelsbergh et al, 1999; Van Geert, 1999; Van der Maas, 1993; Wimmers et al, 1998). These phenomena are characteristic of non-linear dynamical processes. The aim of the dynamic systems approach is to characterise spatio-temporal and functional patterns of motor behaviour in terms of their stability properties by formalising the time-evolution of relevant variables into dynamical equations of motion. Stationary, stable states or patterns of activity, as well as abrupt transitions between different states accompanied by loss of stability (induced by changes in external conditions), have been successfully modelled in this way (Kelso, 1995).

The perspective portrays co-ordination as a process that constrains the potentially free variables of a system into a behavioural unit. A collective variable (order parameter) is the parameter that captures the observed behaviour (co-ordination pattern), while a control parameter is the parameter that leads the system through different co-ordination patterns. Within this approach, the behavioural pattern is regarded as a stable collective state attained by the system under certain constraints (boundary conditions) and informational settings (Zanone et al., 1993). When the control parameter passes through a critical point, a co-ordination pattern that was stable becomes unstable, causing a sudden discrete transition to a qualitatively different, stable co-ordination pattern. Such a change appears without any prescription from outside but is acquired by the system itself, i.e. through self-organisation.

From this perspective the development of co-ordination is also seen as a complex, evolving dynamic process. Developmental systems are self-organising in that new behavioural forms emerge in a non-linear fashion at the macroscopic level (e.g. reaching) as a result of interactions between subsystems at more microscopic levels of organisation (e.g. between neurons or between muscles and joints). In this context, self-organisation is defined as the system's ability to acquire a new spatial, temporal or functional structure by itself (i.e. without any prescription of this structure from the outside). The ability of a system to organise itself is most salient when a qualitative change in order occurs. Such a transition is called a non-equilibrium phase transition.

Tools provided by a dynamic systems approach make it possible to detect qualitative changes (i.e. phase transitions) which are induced by quantitative changes in one or more control parameters. The control parameter is not the cause of the change, although its manipulation is instrumental in creating the new order (e.g. walking, reaching and grasping). It controls in the sense of leading the system through its respective states of equilibrium (tha...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• List of contributors
• Preface
• 1 Theoretical perspectives on the development of movement co-ordination in children
• Part I Ergonomics
• Part II Health sciences
• Part III Sport
• Index