Motor Development: Embodied, Embedded, Enculturated, and Enabling

Abstract

Motor development and psychological development are fundamentally related, but researchers typically consider them separately. In this review, we present four key features of infant motor development and show that motor skill acquisition both requires and reflects basic psychological functions. ( a) Motor development is embodied: Opportunities for action depend on the current status of the body. ( b) Motor development is embedded: Variations in the environment create and constrain possibilities for action. ( c) Motor development is enculturated: Social and cultural influences shape motor behaviors. ( d) Motor development is enabling: New motor skills create new opportunities for exploration and learning that instigate cascades of development across diverse psychological domains. For each of these key features, we show that changes in infants' bodies, environments, and experiences entail behavioral flexibility and are thus essential to psychology. Moreover, we suggest that motor development is an ideal model system for the study of psychological development.

Keywords: culture; developmental cascade; exploration; infant; locomotion; reaching.

Figure 1

Motor development is embodied, embedded, enculturated, and enabling. (a) Embodied movement. Infant walker with red arrows denoting forces acting on the body (gravity, friction forces, ground reaction force) and blue arrows representing forces generated by the body (propulsive force and torques). Footprints show characteristic gait patterns of (top) a novice infant walker with short, irregularly spaced steps and the feet wide apart and (bottom) an experienced infant walker with longer, narrower, more regularly spaced steps (data taken from Lee et al. 2018). (b) Embedded movement. An infant is shown deciding whether and how to descend a steep slope. Footprints show characteristic gait modifications in an experienced infant walker while approaching and descending a shallow 6° slope and a steep 24° slope (data taken from Gill et al. 2009). Green boxes denote the middle sloping section of the walkway. (c) Enculturated movement. An infant is shown taking first steps from the arms of one caregiver into the open arms of another. The illustration is based on Van Gogh’s 1890 painting, “First Steps.” Footprints show the characteristic walking patterns of an infant (black) and caregiver (blue) during free play (data taken from O. Ossmy, J. Hoch, S. Hasan, W.G. Cole, and K. Adolph, unpublished data). (d) Movement enables new developments. The schematic drawing shows the average field of view for crawling and walking infants (data taken from Kretch et al. 2014).