Internat ional Journal of Behavioral Development © 2000 The International Society for the

2000, 24 (4), 385–397 Study of Behavioural Development

http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals/pp/01650254.htm l

Motor development as foundation and future of

developmental psychology
Esther Thelen
Indiana University, Bloomington, USA

The study of how infants and children come to control their bodies is perhaps the oldest topic in
scientiŽc developmental psychology. Yet, for many years the study of motor development lay
dormant. In the last two decades, however, there has been an enormous resurgence of interest. As at
the time of the very beginnings of our Želd, the contemporary study of motor development is
contributing both empirically and theoretically to the larger questions in development and especially
to our understanding of developmental change. In this essay, I trace the course of the changing
fortunes of motor development, evaluate where we have been, what we are doing, and speculate on
some critical issues for the future. The purpose of this essay is to comment on the general themes and
inuences that have been a part of motor development’s ‘‘rise-fall-and-rise-again’’ history. For a
more comprehensive review of substantive topic areas in motor development, readers are referred to
the authoritative treatment recently published by Bertenthal and Clifton (1998) and to the excellent
monograph by GoldŽeld (1995).

Human infants are born with very little control over their
bodies. Yet within a year or so, they are able to sit, stand, walk,
reach, manipulate objects, feed themselves, gesture, and even
speak a few works. A year later, toddlers are adept at running,
climbing, scribbling, riding a tricycle, and talking in simple
sentences. For parents, these new motor skills are the most
dramatic and visible changes in the Žrst few years of life,
frequently noted and commented on. For those interested in
studying developmental processes, this sequential unfolding of
motor milestones is like an open window on change. Whereas
children’s mental lives must be measured indirectly, their
movements are continuously observable. Each new pattern is
there to see and describe. There are no hidden processes
between the control of the movement and its actual execution.
(1935) well-known and still contentious study of the twins
Jimmy and Johnny, and the Nancy Bayley Berkeley Growth
Study (1935). In 1946, Carmichael’s Manual of Child
Psychology contained two seminal articles by Gesell (1946)
and McGraw (1946), attesting to the theoretical status of
motor studies in the Želd.
There were three important and related legacies from this
golden age of motor development research. The Žrst legacy
from these pioneers is their theoretical contributions, and
especially their strong grounding of human development in
biology. The second is empirical through the introduction of
detailed and rich description, novel methods for capturing
human movement, and clever natural experiments. The third,
and perhaps the most enduring, was the establishment of
developmental norms. I discuss each of these legacies in turn.

Motor development: The golden age
It is no surprise, therefore, that the emergence of motor skills
has Žgured so prominently in the Žrst scientiŽc studies of
human development, truly laying the foundation of the Želd.
Rich description of infant movement dates to the last century
with Darwin’s (1877) well-known ‘‘biography’’ of his own
child and the pioneering work of the German physiologist
Preyer (1888), and the tradition was continued into the 20th
century with the narratives of Millicent Shinn (1900). The full
owering of the descriptive work in motor development began
in the 1920s with the publication of the Žrst of Arnold Gesell’s
pathbreaking research and popular monographs (e.g., Gesell,
1928; Gesell & Thompson, 1934). The golden age continued
through the 1930s with Mary Shirley’s (1931) exquisite
longitudinal descriptions of 25 infants, Myrtle McGraw’s
The legacy of development grounded in biology
The two most important theorists of this era were Arnold
Gesell and Myrtle McGraw. Both provided us with massive
descriptions of early motor development. But for both
scientists, the motor catalogues were not the ends in
themselves. Rather, both Gesell and McGraw saw these
descriptions as a way to understanding the most general, and
profound, developmental principles.
Gesell and the dynamic principles of growth. Gesell left us the
most well-articulated comprehensive developmental theory,
one that is still insightful and attractive (for many details, see
Thelen & Adolph, 1992). From the start of his career, Gesell
claimed deep roots in the science of biology. He viewed
development as a unitary process, requiring description at

Correspondence should be addressed to Esther Thelen, Indiana

University, Department of Psychology, 1101 East Tenth Street,
Bloomington IN 47405; e-mail: thelene@indiana.edu.
386 THELEN / MOTOR DEVELOPMENT: THE FUTURE OF DEVELOPMENTAL PSYCHOLOGY
many levels encompassing evolution, embryology, comparative
psychology, neurophysiology, and anthropology. He was
especially inuenced by Charles Darwin, whom he considered
the founder of the scientiŽc study of the child and by G.E.
Coghill, an early behavioural embryologist.
Gesell credited Darwin with making humans legitimate
subjects of scientiŽc study. Before Darwin, Gesell maintained,
infants and children were understood primarily in theological
and philosophical terms. Because Darwin showed that the
human mind was continuous with all other living things, he
gave scientists the freedom to study human nature in the same
scientiŽc way they investigated the rest of the natural world.
Gesell attributed to Darwin his core belief that mental life is
continuous with, and impelled by, the same processes that
drive all organic growth. Moreover, Gesell admired Darwin’s
naturalistic methods, and he saw himself, too, as a naturalist,
‘‘tirelessly’’ seeking ‘‘ideological order’’ through relentless
observation and comparison (Gesell, 1948, pp. 36–37).
Gesell’s other hero was Coghill, who was his contemporary
and a leader in the new Želd of behavioural embryology.
Coghill’s major work was on the behavioural embryology of the
salamander Amblystoma. Coghill’s contribution was to show a
correlation between the development of movement patterns in
these animals and corresponding changes in their nervous
systems. To do this, Coghill took motion pictures of locomot-
ing salamanders at different stages of development and then
painstakingly traced the patterns of their limbs and their
bodies. He discovered that a particular form of locomotion, for
example a ‘‘C’’ body shape or an ‘‘S’’ body shape was
coincident with the growth of speciŽc neural connections
(Coghill, 1969).
Gesell learned several lessons from Coghill. First, he saw
that development was a morphological process, that is, a
change in the form of behaviour. Gesell believed that just as
movements and postures provided a read-out of the nervous
system, so even mental development had this morphological
character, that is, it could be understood though observable
behaviour. Second, Gesell was convinced that principles of
growth and development illustrated by Coghill’s studies of the
salamander were the same for all species, including humans.
‘‘We believe that the growth processes which mold the body
and behavior of the human infant are in essence comparable
with those which are being successfully analyzed by experi-
mental embryology’’, he claimed (Gesell & Thompson, 1938,
p. v). This led to Gesell’s third legacy from Coghill, the view
that behavioural changes followed biologically driven neural
maturation, and not the other way around. Gesell’s matura-
tionist views stemmed directly from Coghill’s discoveries that
in the salamander, changes in movement patterns emerged
from neural events that happened before sensory connections
were made.1 Movements, therefore, were a product of
autonomous neural changes, not from the sensory input.
‘‘Patterns of behavior in all species’’, Gesell wrote, ‘‘tend to
follow an orderly genetic sequence in their emergence. This
genetic sequence is itself an expression of elaborate pattern—a
pattern whose basic outline is itself the product of evolution
and is under the inuence of maturational factors’’ (Gesell,
1933, p. 217).
1
Bergenn et al. (1992) argue that Gesell’s interpretation of Coghill is more
‘‘maturationist’’ than Coghill himself espoused.
Just as Coghill unlocked the mysteries of salamander
development through Žlming postures and movements, so
Gesell believed he could discover the secrets of human
development by Žlming and describing the morphology of
movement. For example, Gesell learned from embryology that
new forms and tissues evolved from chemical gradients and
polarities in the fertilised egg and early embryo. In his principle
of developmental direction, he argued that just as the direction of
early embryonic growth is determined by a longitudinal
gradient in the mesoderm, so the same direction of change
appears in the fetus and the newborn infant. That is,
development proceeds in a head-to-tail fashion, in succeeding
waves, throughout the early years. Superimposed on this
gradient is the proximal-to-distal sequence of maturation, with
control emerging Žrst in the trunk and head, and later in the
distal digits. This theme of patterns arising from gradients and
polarities has re-emerged in contemporary neuroembryology.
Edelman (1988), for instance, shows how the complexity of
form develops, not through precise speciŽcation from the
genes, but through local, physical, and chemical interactions at
the surfaces of the cells. He echoes Gesell’s views of
development as a morphological or ‘‘topobiological’’ process,
where collectives of cells or neural elements self-organise into
waves of pattern change.
The practical importance of Gesell’s theory was to act as a
counterweight to the popular notions of behaviourism that
were fashionable at that time. To parents who were told that
infants were totally shaped by their environment, Gesell
offered a different view, one of an autonomous unfolding of
potential. The role of the environment was to support this
unfolding, but it did not engender it. Thus, there was no point
of training or teaching children until they were developmen-
tally ready.
McGraw and the biology of development. Myrtle McGraw was
also a developmentalist of great sophistication and subtlety
who used human motor skill development as her principle
empirical data. Like Gesell, she questioned the relevance of
behaviourism, the dominant paradigm in experimental psy-
chology, as an explanation for developmental change. Rather,
she, too, took inspiration from a generation of experimental
biologists to consider the processes of growth, which she
understood as a continuous, contingent, holistic but nonlinear
organic process (McGraw, 1935). She was also inuenced by
Coghill for his emphasis on development as patterns of total
form (rather than the concatenation of individual reexes, a
more behaviourist view) and for his studies relating nervous
structure to behavioural function.
Although McGraw believed strongly in the ultimate
inseparability of structure and experience, she expressly
designed her study of the twins Jimmy and Johnny (1935) to
ask which of their early motor skills could be trained and which
were more Žxed by developmental design. One twin, Johnny,
was exercised daily in a variety of skills, both universal (sitting,
walking) and culturally speciŽc (swimming, roller-skating).
She discovered that although training had some effects on the
quality and initial performance of Johnny’s movements, in the
long run, intensive training did not make a big difference.
These results were taken up by the popular press as refuting
associationism and supporting the primacy of maturation.
Bergenn, Dalton, and Lipsitt (1992) claim that McGraw’s
legacy as a maturationist oversimpliŽes her more sophisticated
view of development. They are likely correct, but the twin
 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF BEHAVIORAL DEVELOPMENT, 2000, 24 (4), 385–397
study, plus her subsequent work on the development of
locomotion, put the role of maturation into the forefront.
McGraw’s last major work was a monograph on the
development of locomotion, The Neuromuscular Maturation of
the Human Infant (1945), a model of astute interpretation.
Again, inspired by Coghill, she described the phases of prone
and upright locomotion as a series of whole body forms. At
Žrst, she claimed, infants movements are involuntary and
under control of subcortical centres. Successive phases of new
forms emerged as behaviour becomes increasingly encepha-
lised. In addressing the role of learning versus maturation in
this study. McGraw reiterated that the two inuences are
impossible to parse apart. Nonetheless, she stated that for
locomotion, ‘‘Improvement of a function through practice or
exercise appears to coincide with cortical participation in the
activity’’ (McGraw, 1945/1972, p. 127), in essence agreeing
with Gesell that an amount of readiness is necessary, and that
there may be critical periods for advancing function.
The legacy of methodology
From our technology-rich vantage point, we can only stand in
awe of the detailed data so cleverly and painstakingly collected
by the early movement pioneers. In addition to photographs
and movies, analysed in great detail, they also recorded
movement directly. For instance, Burnside (1927) and Shirley
(1931) recorded infants’ and toddlers’ footprints by oiling the
children’s feet and allowing them to walk on paper. Many
critical parameters of gait can be measured by this simple
technique, and indeed it is still being used today (Adolph,
1997). Another methodological advance, important in the
establishment of developmental norms, was repeated testing of
the same children in a large number of standardised tasks.
Gesell took this testing to high art, with highly standardised
equipment, structured interviews, and detailed instructions to
the testers (Gesell & Thompson, 1938). The point, of course,
was to chart developmental changes in a systematic way.
Piaget’s (1952) methods, in contrast, were very exible, as he
continually adapted the tasks to Žt the child. Contemporary
researchers have again raised the issue of whether a standar-
dised task really reveals the child’s full abilities, suggesting task
materials may need to be scaled to children’s growth (Newell,
Scully, McDonald, & Baillargeon, 1989) or measured in a
supportive social situation (Vygotsky, 1978).
Finally, we must credit both Gesell (Gesell & Thompson,
1929) and McGraw (1935) for the intensive study of twins, a
method still used intensively today to parse apart the
contributions of genetics and environment.
The legacy of developmental norms
The legacies of theory and measurement are closely tied to the
third, and perhaps most lasting inuence, that of develop-
mental norms. Although mental testing of children dates back
to the early part of the 20th century, largely through the work
of Alfred Binet, it was Gesell who brought the concept of
developmental norms for infants and young children both into
the mainstream of developmental psychology, into the popular
psyche, and into the homes of millions of parents. The test
battery that Gesell and his staff perfected in the 1920s and
1930s still forms the basis of the most widely used infant tests
today, the Bayley Scales of Infant Development and the
387
Denver Developmental Screening test. Today such tests are so
universally accepted that their origins are little discussed. But it
was Gesell’s theoretical insights and methodological rigour that
led to the vast catalogue of motor milestones on which these
tests were based.
Gesell, like Coghill, saw in the postural and movement
forms a direct reection of the internal, lawful processes of
growth. The link to collecting normative data on infant
movement was a direct one:
. . . the underlying concepts of the normative study may be
summed up as follows: Behavior grows. Growth expresses itself
in ordered patterns. Behavior growth, like physical growth, is a
morphosis. It is a process which produces a progressive
organization of behavior forms. This morphogenesis can be
investigated by morphographic methods and especially by
analytic cinematography. By these methods we can ascertain
the lawful sequences and norms of psychological growth for the
purpose of genetic research. These norms may also be used as
standards of reference for the analytic appraisal of development
status (Gesell & Thompson, 1938, p. 4).
Thus, our contemporary reliance on movement for early
developmental diagnosis may have had its origins in Gesell’s
theoretical interest in the more general issues of the nature of
development. In particular, Gesell believed that movement was
the most direct expression of the forms of organic growth. By
studying postures and movements of infants and children.
Gesell both illustrated the more general principles of develop-
ment and provided an enormous set of normative data.
In the late 1920s and early 1930s, Gesell and his colleagues
observed over 500 infants in a carefully structured and highly
detailed series of tasks to establish age norms for a long list of
motor behaviours. For example, Gesell and Thompson (1934,
1938) reported age norms for 41 stages of siting behaviour, 58
stages of pellet behaviour, and 50 stages of standing and
walking behaviour. Many of these behaviours were Žlmed
using precise cinematic methods (Gesell & Thompson, 1934).
Gesell claimed that his interest in such extensive norms was
not to establish a single model of performance for everyone,
but to have a standard by which the ‘‘abounding variety of
individual differences’’ (Gesell &Thompson, 1938, p. 4) could
be detected and understood. In reality, Gesell’s books for both
professionals and parents were much more concerned with the
behaviour of the ‘‘typical’’ child at particular ages than in this
variability. Indeed, Gesell chose his sample to be highly
homogeneous: children of European descent, economically
stable, intact families, 99% of whom attended church.
The idea that by a particular age, an infant or toddler
‘‘should’’ have achieved a particular motor milestone has not
only become a standard developmental diagnosis, but it has
also become completely entrenched in our cultural beliefs
about child-raising. For instance, I own a used copy of Gesell’s
The First Five Years of Life (1940) which was originally a gift
from ‘‘Mother Dingle’’ to the ‘‘Dunlaps’’ with the loving
inscription, ‘‘Please read from cover to cover’’. This book is
one of many written by Gesell which sets normative standards
of behaviour based on his observations, and we can imagine the
Dunlaps scrutinising their child at each age for ‘‘typical
behaviour’’ in each ‘‘typical day’’.
In sum, the golden age of motor development left us with a
rich heritage: a deep understanding of growth and form, an
appreciation for the interweaving and nonlinear course of
388 THELEN / MOTOR DEVELOPMENT: THE FUTURE OF DEVELOPMENTAL PSYCHOLOGY
development, a sense of our biological continuity, and exact
scientiŽc methods. What happened to that legacy?
Motor development: The dormant times
After more than two decades of extraordinary theoretical and
empirical contributions to our understanding of development,
the study of motor systems had declined by 1950 and then lay
dormant for nearly 30 years afterward. This dramatic reversal
of fortunes can be attributed to both the state of the Želd itself
and to changes occurring in psychology as a whole.
As I have suggested previously, it may be that the successes
of the early pioneers also contributed to the decline of the Želd
(Thelen, 1995). They produced vast and widely published
catalogues of motor milestones and richly detailed descriptive
studies. The norms were incorporated into developmental tests
and became family lore, at least in middle class North
American families. There seemed to be little left to do.
Moreover, both Gesell’s and McGraw’s theoretical positions
appeared to lead to dead-ends in terms of further empirical
studies, but for different reasons. Once Gesell showed, through
the descriptive topologies of behaviour, that human develop-
ment obeyed universal principles, the case was effectively
closed. Change dictated by the principles of developmental
direction, reciprocal interweaving or individuating maturation
was a biological imperative. Although Gesell acknowledged (as
did McGraw) the interaction of experience and maturation, he
did not inquire further about those mechanisms, nor did he
encourage others to do so. For McGraw, the situation was
more complex. She admitted in her 1962 Foreword to The
Neuromuscular Maturation of the Human Infant that she did not
achieve her goal of relating the development of function to the
maturation of structure. Part of the problem was that methods
for studying changes in the brain were inadequate. But she also
recognised that the earlier theoretical formulations were too
simplistic, especially the division of behaviour into cortical and
subcortical inuences, and the neat separation of ‘‘instincts’’
versus ‘‘acquired traits’’ or ‘‘maturation’’ opposed to ‘‘learn-
ing’’ (McGraw, 1945/1973). Throughout her career, McGraw
continued to elaborate a biologically sophisticated theory of
development (Bergenn et al., 1992), but she did not translate
her insights into new empirical work. And she, too, failed to
convince others to continue to use motor development as an
entry for understanding processes of change.
The decline of motor development must also be understood
in the light of the other forces in the Želd during the 1950s,
1960s, and 1970s. During this time, learning theorists and
experimental psychologists dominated academic departments
of psychology. Descriptive and normative data, no matter how
detailed, could not be compared in apparent ‘‘scientiŽc rigour’’
to the tightly controlled experimental methods practised by
these disciplines. Moreover, neither learning theory nor main-
stream experimental psychology has traditionally considered
how people control their bodies a question of major interest.
Movement is often treated as only a by-product of the more
psychologically interesting processes, or an arbitrary response
modality such as pressing a lever.
At the same time, the focus in developmental psychology
shifted dramatically. The work of Jean Piaget became increas-
ingly well known and highly inuential, igniting fervent interest
in the inner mental life of children (as opposed to the form of
their overt behaviour), which continues to this day. (It is
perhaps ironic that although Piaget’s theory of mental
development was entirely grounded in perception-action, later
interpreters were more interested in the contents of mind than
its sensorimotor origins.) Piaget offered descriptive stages, but
he also inspired brilliant experimentation, something that the
motor development theorists did not do. The other dominant
force on the Želd came from the ethological and psycho-
dynamic theories of John Bowlby on the nature of attachment.
Here again, I believe that Bowlby’s richly descriptive work
made such a long-lasting impact because it was implemented
experimentally by Mary Ainsworth. The lesson may be that
even the most elegant theory survives only as it generates new
and copious empirical research.
Motor development: Two decades of rebirth
Beginning in about 1980, the tide began to turn again, and
interest in movement gradually gained momentum. Just as
multiple factors contributed to its decline, the Želd’s revitalisa-
tion has come from a number of converging inuences. These
included several theoretical advances: new ideas in movement
science and biomechanics, insights from ecological psychology,
and the import of dynamic systems theory. But the Želd has
also beneŽted greatly from a new understanding of the
plasticity of the brain, and from technological advances in
recording movement and brain activity.
The importance of N. Bernstein
However subtle and interactionist their own positions, the
legacy from the neuroembryologists, through Gesell and
McGraw, was that movement was a direct read-out of the
maturational status of the nervous system. The reverse was
scarcely considered—that the developmental course of the
nervous system may be moulded by the nature of the body and
how it moves. The same ‘‘top-down’’ view was also dominant
in the psychology of adult movement, where most effort was
devoted to understanding the nature of the executive ‘‘motor
programme’’. We can credit the Soviet movement physiologist,
N. Bernstein (1967), for inspiring a real revolution in the
conceptualisation of movement. Although he too worked
during the 1930s, Bernstein’s ideas only became known in
the West after his book was translated in 1967.
Bernstein’s seminal insight was to pose the control issue
differently. He started with the body, which, he noted, had
hundreds of bones and joints and millions of muscle Žbres. Yet
every movement is a coherent, coordinated event. How can the
brain accomplish this feat of coordination, given so many
possible combinations, or degrees of freedom? The answer,
according to Bernstein, was that movements were organised in
synergies, that is, a functional linking together of muscles into
ensembles that worked together. What the brain recruited,
according to Bernstein, was not individual muscles, but an
appropriate pattern to accomplish a functional task. This vastly
simpliŽed the control problem. Indeed, Bernstein showed that
movement was function-speciŽc and not muscle-speciŽc: His
classic example is that you can sign your name using a pen on
paper or using a broomstick on a blackboard, but the signature
remains the same.
 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF BEHAVIORAL DEVELOPMENT, 2000, 24 (4), 385–397
Moreover, as the motor system is assembled for functional
action, it actually exploits the mechanical properties of the
limbs and body. For example, limbs have springlike properties
because of the elastic qualities of the muscles and the
anatomical conŽguration of the joints. When an ordinary
spring is stretched and let go, it oscillates in a regular trajectory.
The movement pattern need not be explicitly conŽgured
because it arises from the natural properties of the spring.
Similarly, many aspects of human movements need not be
detailed in the nervous system because they arise by themselves
from the natural properties of the body. One good example is
walking: As people step on one leg and then shift their weight
forward over it, the back leg is stretched and stores energy, like
a spring. As that leg swings forward, it uses little active muscle
contraction, but rather relies on the potential energy gained by
stretching the muscles.
In his writing on the development of movement, Bernstein
turned the old theories on their heads. It was not, he claimed,
so much the nervous system instructing the muscles, as the
dynamics of the movement instructing the nervous system.
Children must learn the biodynamics of their bodies, the
changing forces that produce and accompany each movement
in each situation. To learn to walk, for instance, infants must
deal with the complex interactions between the movements of
the legs, the centre of gravity of the body, and the support
surface. These cannot be instructed beforehand, but must be
individually assembled through experience. Eventually, infants
learn not just to control their movements, but to make them
efŽcient by exploiting their biomechanics, that is, using what
the system can provide ‘‘for free’’.
The impact of Bernstein on the study of motor development
was to shift the focus from thinking exclusively of the central
nervous system as the sole contributor to the emergence of new
skills to considering the contributions of the biomechanics of
the moving limbs. In my early work on the coordination and
control of spontaneous leg movements in infants, for example,
I came across two puzzling results. The Žrst involved the
kinematic (time-space) organisation of the common kicking
movements seen throughout the Žrst six months. These
movements are well coordinated, displaying a nearly simulta-
neous exion and extension of the hips, knees, and ankles.
Moreover, the durations of the parts of the movements were
not random, but showed structure as well (Thelen & Fisher,
1983). How did this structure arise? Surprisingly, when my
colleagues and I looked at the patterns of muscle activity that
produced kicking movements, we found that the underlying
electromyographic activity was far less patterned than the
resulting movement. Indeed, infants appeared to just contract
all the exors and extensors at the beginning of the exion
phase of the kick and use very little muscle activation
thereafter. Extension was largely passive. This meant that the
extension was not directly programmed by the central nervous
system, but rather emerged as a consequence of the elastic
properties of the legs and their stored energy when exed. In
short, the precise patterns of these movements came about
from the interplay between the neural command and the
peripheral properties of the body.
The second puzzle involved the well known newborn
‘‘stepping’’ reex. Newborn infants will perform alternating
step-like movements when held upright with their feet on a
surface. Within a few months, such movements can no longer
be elicited. Since the time of Preyer (1888), the common
explanation has been that the patterns are a primitive reex,
389
which becomes inhibited as the cortex, and voluntary move-
ment, matures. However, while stepping when upright does
disappear, kinematically identical kicking movements per-
formed while infants are supine, do not, and indeed increase
in frequency. To account for this strange disparity—move-
ments that are a function of body posture—we looked again to
the peripheral contribution. Here again, we discovered that
there was a relation between infants’ abilities to step and the
mass of their legs. As their legs became heavier through the
deposition of subcutaneous fat in the Žrst few months, their
ability to lift them in the biomechanically demanding upright
posture decreased. Simply laying infants down, or reducing the
effective mass by holding them in a tank of water, restored the
movement (Thelen & Fisher, 1982). Again, performance
depended on all elements of the moving system.
Because body masses, lengths, centres of inertia and so on
are continually changing as infants grow, and because new
postures bring on new biomechanical challenges, skill acquisi-
tion is a continually interactive process. Infants must discover
how to produce the appropriate coordinative pattern and
modulate it to Žt the task. Furthermore, the addition of each
new skill opens different opportunities for these interactions to
occur. Development progresses through each new achieve-
ment, setting the next set of challenges. Thus, Bernstein’s
impact was to reintroduce the child as an active movement
problem-solver, much as Piaget had replaced the child as
passive stimulus-responder with one who actively seeks stimuli
in the world.
The importance of ecological psychology
Bernstein’s message of the child as an active explorer meshed
beautifully with the second powerful inuence on the
renaissance of motor development research. This was the
theoretical approach loosely known as ecological psychology,
based largely on the work of psychologists Eleanor Gibson (E.J.
Gibson, 1969, 1988) and James Gibson (J.J. Gibson, 1966).
The basic assumption of Gibsonian psychology is that people,
and other animals, are able to directly perceive structured
information in the environment that enables them to function-
ally act within it. (This is in contrast, of course, to the view that
the environment does not have meaning until it is recon-
structed within the brain.) The goal of development, in the
Gibsonian view, therefore, is for infants and children to
progressively discover the affordances for action in the
environment, a process of matching the abilities of the actors
with the opportunities in the world around them. Eleanor
Gibson has been especially eloquent in championing the child
as an active explorer in this process, where both perception and
action are mutually coupled together. According to her,
infants, from the beginning, are continually coordinating their
movements with concurrent perceptual information to learn
how to maintain balance, reach for appropriate objects, and
locomote across various surfaces and terrains (Gibson, 1988).
Research from this perspective is not primarily concerned with
the form of the movement or its neurological control, but how
children come to recognise the match between their abilities
and the qualities of the task environment. One of E. Gibson’s
classic studies, for example, showed that crawling infants
crossed both a rigid surface and a squishy waterbed without
hesitation. Toddlers, however, hesitated and explored the
surface of the waterbed, and then shifted to crawling rather
than risk falling on the squishy surface (Gibson et al., 1987).
390 THELEN / MOTOR DEVELOPMENT: THE FUTURE OF DEVELOPMENTAL PSYCHOLOGY
Ecological psychology has shaped the Želd of contemporary
motor development studies in several important ways. First
and foremost is the notion that perception and action are
inseparable in the formation of skills. Perception is essential for
movement, but movement also informs perception. Move-
ments of the head and eyes, for instance, enable the perceiver
to sample the visual array. Movements of the arms, hands, and
Žngers are necessary for haptic exploration of new objects and
surfaces. Locomotion is essential for understanding the quality
of surfaces and the layout of the spatial surroundings. Indeed,
we can even cast movement as a form of perception, a way of
knowing the world by moving in it.
Second, research in the ecological tradition has made
researchers aware that perception in the service of action is
always multimodal, likely right from birth. For example, a
study by Rochat and Morgan (1995) has shown that very
young infants are aware of the correspondences between their
visual perception of their moving limbs and their propriocep-
tive and haptic senses of them. In these studies, infants were
shown two side-by-side televised displays of their own legs,
clothed in distinctively striped stockings. On one display, the
video image was concordant with the infants’ views of their legs
as they sat in the infant seat. On the second, the legs were
reversed. Infants showed by their preferential looking that they
could distinguish the two displays. Clearly, they must have,
through experience of looking and moving, mapped the
correspondences between what they saw and what they felt.
The third lasting contribution from ecological psychology to
current motor development research is the emphasis on
exploration as an important force for developmental change.
E.J. Gibson (1988), for instance, describes three overlapping
phases of exploration in the Žrst year. At Žrst, infants explore
events with vision and hearing. Next, they explore objects with
reaching, grasping, and mouthing, and later, they explore the
large layout with self-produced locomotion. Changing motor
skills contribute to infants’ exploratory behaviour, but the
behaviour itself also leads to new motor skills.
The introduction of dynamic systems
Both Bernstein and the Gibsons were concerned with a similar
issue: How to avoid the ‘‘homunculus’’ problem—some entity
in the head of the actor that represents the world and makes
decisions to act in it. For Gibson, the solution was direct
perception. For Bernstein, the solution was reducing the
executive decisions by the synergistic organisation of the brain
and body. In the 1980s, a group of young movement theorists
centred around the Haskins Laboratories in New Haven,
Connecticut merged these two theoretical traditions with
recent advances in the physics and thermodynamics of
complex systems to produce a radical change in the theory of
motor control and development. In two landmark papers,
Peter Kugler, Scott Kelso, and Michael Turvey (Kelso, Holt,
Kugler, & Turvey, 1980; Kugler, Kelso, & Turvey, 1980)
considered Bernstein’s synergies in a new light, as self-
organising systems, and described by the same dynamic
principles that governed complex, so-called dissipative struc-
tures, in physics and chemistry. (Dissipative systems absorb
energy to maintain themselves in organised states far from
thermodynamic equilibrium. All biological systems are dis-
sipative, but so are some other natural systems such as cloud
formations or uid ows.)
The key insight here was that when a person assembles a
motor synergy to do some task, the participating components
cohere and produce patterns that have temporal and spatial
organisation that is not the result solely of the detailed
instructions from the nervous system. These investigators,
and subsequently many others, demonstrated that simple,
cyclical movements of the limbs in humans could be described
by the mathematics used for coupled oscillators in general. In
particular, they discovered that when people move their body
parts in a rhythmical fashion, they have preferred coordination
modes: Spatial and temporal patterns that are comfortable and
easily performed. Other possible patterns are unstable, such
that the preferred mode seems to suck them in, or ‘‘attract’’
them. Under certain conditions, people may spontaneously
shift coordination modes from one preferred regime to
another. Again, using locomotion as an example, quadrupeds
use different gaits depending on the speeds of their move-
ments. The gaits performed are those that are the most energy
efŽcient for the particular speed (see Kelso, 1995).
There were several important implications of dynamic
systems ideas for conceptualising motor development, and
for developmental theory in general. First is the restatement of
Bernstein’s ideas that every movement is a system-wide
ensemble of all participating components, assembled in the
context of a particular task at hand. Kugler and Turvey (1987)
used the terms ‘‘soft-assembly’’ to describe this exibility:
Behaviour patterns are not prescribed, although some may be
preferred. This meant that behaviour was not ‘‘hard-wired’’
into the brain, but emerges ‘‘online’’ in the light of the person’s
available structure, energetic resources, and the nature of the
task to be done.
Second, dynamic systems theory emphasised not only
patterns in space, but also that behaviour has a pattern over
time as well. This is important because it changes the focus
from taking a ‘‘snapshot’’ of behaviour at a particular age or
skill level, to more serious considerations of how change occurs
over time. Here, the timescale could be seconds, or minutes, or
weeks, or months. Indeed, from a dynamic perspective, it
makes little sense to consider changes at different time scales as
different processes. What happens at an action timescale
cascades into changes over the timescales of learning and
development.
Finally, there is the idea that the coordinative state of a
stable movement pattern—for instance, walking or reaching—
behaves like a dynamic attractor with varying levels of stability.
For a pattern to change, something must disrupt the stability of
the old pattern, so that the components can coalesce into new
forms. In terms of development, this meant characterising
behaviour in terms of its stability to identify the transitions into
new forms and test the mechanisms that engender them (see
Thelen & Smith, 1994; Thelen & Ulrich, 1991).
Systems ideas are not new in developmental psychology.
They have been proposed by Werner, Lewin, Piaget, and many
others. For example, Piaget (1952) believed that new levels of
mental equilibration could only be achieved through disequili-
bration of current stages, similar to the phase shifts described
by contemporary dynamicists, and he was profoundly con-
cerned with processes of change. Current dynamic systems
theories have gone beyond the old formulations, however, in
two important ways. First, we have achieved some level of
success in reŽning the precision of our ideas through formal
mathematical models (see Newell & Molenaar, 1998; Thelen,
Schöner, Scheier, & Smith, in press). But equally important,
dynamic thinking has inspired a renewed interest in empirical
 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF BEHAVIORAL DEVELOPMENT, 2000, 24 (4), 385–397
work that is closer to Piaget’s original agenda of looking at
processes of change. (In the post-Piagetian era, studies were
more concerned with describing age-deŽned performance
stages.) Process accounts often involve detailed longitudinal
studies to identify times of transition combined with micro-
genetic methods that test possible mechanisms that move the
child into new developmental phases. Finally, dynamic systems
have also inspired studies that incorporate multiple levels of
analysis from the cognitive to the biomechanical. For instance,
I have used dynamic systems principles in my own work to
uncover the multiple inuences on change in locomotor-
movement (Thelen & Ulrich, 1991) and reaching (Thelen et
al., 1993, 1996).
Plasticity in the central nervous system
There have been two other inuences on research in motor
development that bear mention. First, just as our predecessors
over 50 years ago were inspired by the current Žndings in
neurophysiology, so too has contemporary thinking been
shaped by remarkable discoveries in neuroscience. First is a
growing understanding of the systems-wide properties of the
brain. Although much research is dedicated to pinpointing
local areas that subserve different functions, it has also been
discovered that no area works in isolation. Indeed, neural
networks supporting perceptual, motor, and cognitive pro-
cesses are widely and densely interconnected (see, for instance,
Edelman, 1987). For example, neurones responding to both
spatial localisation of visual targets and to intended movements
are found in many areas of the cortex. At the same time, a
single neurone may be activated by the visual, planning,
memory, and movement aspects of a task (reviewed in Thelen
et al., in press). These Žndings reinforce the idea that
perception and action, and its cognitive counterparts, are part
of the same continuous and coupled process.
Second, neuroscientists have discovered remarkable, dy-
namic plasticity in even the adult brain. By careful brain
mapping in monkeys, they have established that experiences in
the world both establish and maintain the functional con-
nectivity of both cortical and subcortical areas. Old ideas about
the Žxity of the adult brain have been overthrown (see, for
example, Merzenich, Allard, & Jenkins, 1990). The implica-
tion for development is profound: Experience moulds the
brain. What may have previously been considered as autono-
mous maturational changes in brain function may indeed be
driven by children’s everyday actions in the world. But the loop
is still closed: Just as experience reorganises the brain, so also
the resulting improvements in perceptual discrimination,
memory, and motor control provide children with new
opportunities for experience to further remap the brain.
A Žnal major inuence in the Želd has been the important
theoretical work of Gerald Edelman, which is a synthesis of
current neuroembryology, neurophysiology, and behavioural
development consistent with Bernstein, Gibson, and dynamic
systems. In his Theory of Neuronal Group Selection, Edelman
(1987) proposes that adaptive behaviour emerges as the
recurrent perceiving and acting in the world strengthens
particular neural networks such that patterns are progressively
selected from many wider possibilities. In his view, genetic and
neuroembryonic processes provide the rough outline of the
neural anatomy. The functional mapping of the brain is
subsequently experience-dependent, especially through per-
ceptual-motor exploration.
391
Technological contributions to motor development
When Halverson (1931) published his very detailed studies of
the development of prehension, he collected his kinematic data
by Žlming infants reaching over a table with a grid drawn on it.
From the Žlm, he traced the path of the hand, frame-by-frame,
and then extracted the quantitative data from the measure-
ments on the grid. Seventy years later, the fundamental
technique for measuring movement is the same: Sample the
position of the body part in space many times per second and
reconstruct the pathway of the moving segment. But we now
have equipment to do this much more rapidly and accurately.
Video has replaced expensive movie Žlm, which required
special lighting and development. Devices that automatically
track markers on the limbs with great precision are commer-
cially available. Computers that can handle the very large
datasets generated by movement analysis are also inexpensive
and accessible to all. In addition to measuring movement, we
can now also track forces through the use of force platforms
and patterns of muscle activation with electromyography.
Although it requires a great deal of skill and patience to use
these sophisticated techniques with infants and children, there
are a number of laboratories around the world that have
successfully conquered the challenges.
There is no question that these technological advances have
contributed greatly to advances in our understanding of motor
development, perhaps more than in any other area of
developmental psychology. It may be that our visions of what
questions can be asked are limited by the means we have to
answer them.
Major themes in contemporary motor
development
In this section, I review the current major thrusts in the study
of motor development in the light of the historical precedence
of the Želd. Again, this review is far from exhaustive. In the
Žnal section, I point to some new directions for the future.
Descriptions of the development of motor skill:
Understanding coordination and control
We still carry on the heritage of McGraw and Gesell by using
detailed, longitudinal studies as the foundation for under-
standing motor skill development. Like our predecessors, we
also use these studies to infer developmental changes in the
underlying mechanisms. Moreover, from the point of view of
dynamic systems, such studies are essential for providing the
‘‘landscape’’ of behavioural patterns: When they are stable and
when they change. This is the Žrst step for identifying points of
transition, where the system may be probed by experiments.
Thus, longitudinal studies are further supplemented by
experiments to test hypotheses about coordination and control.
Notable examples of contemporary descriptive work are the
pioneering studies of Claes von Hofsten on infant reaching
(1979, 1982, 1984, 1991). Von Hofsten was the Žrst to re-
introduce detailed kinematic measures of infant movement,
after Halverson’s efforts 40 years earlier. Especially compelling
were von Hofsten’s (1980) demonstrations of young infants
catching moving objects, a seemingly remarkable precocious
ability. Von Hofsten’s work has been extended by other
longitudinal studies of reaching using even more dense
392 THELEN / MOTOR DEVELOPMENT: THE FUTURE OF DEVELOPMENTAL PSYCHOLOGY
sampling techniques and adding kinetic and electromyographic
measures (Spencer & Thelen, 2000; Thelen et al., 1993;
Thelen, Corbetta, & Spencer, 1996), and following infants
until they were several years old (Konczak, Borutta, &
Dichgans, 1997; Konczak, Borutta, Topka, & Dichgans,
1995).
Lower limb movements have also received attention. For
instance, my colleagues and I were the Žrst to describe infants’
spontaneous leg movements using kinematic techniques.
Previously, infants’ leg movements, because they were not
apparently goal-directed, were thought to be disorganised or
random. However, we demonstrated a high degree of
coordination both within and between limbs and a pattern of
developmental changes in that organisation. We followed this
by a more in-depth look at the kinetics of infant leg
movements, that is, how infants managed the forces that
produce movements (Jensen, Ulrich, Thelen, Schneider, &
Zernicke, 1994; Schneider, Zernicke, Ulrich, Jensen, &
Thelen, 1990).
As in motor development’s ‘‘golden-age’’, the development
of upright locomotion has been a primary focus in contem-
porary studies. Learning to walk is a dramatic developmental
milestone, the transition from infancy to childhood. Moreover,
there has been increasing recognition of the complexity of the
task, and thus, in the question of how infants solve the
problems involved (Thelen, 1984). For example, Sutherland
(1984) reported gait measures on children up to seven years of
age, documenting kinematic changes in step parameters and
joint excursions, as well as changes in muscle patterns. Bril and
Breniere (1992; Breniere, Bril, & Fontaine, 1989) focused
more directly on changes in newly walking infants, using a
large force plate to provide detailed descriptions of weight
shifts and propulsive forces. Clark and Phillips (1988) looked
primarily at changes in interlimb coordination over a similar
time period. Moreover, there have been two recent long-
itudinal studies of interlimb patterns in crawling, another topic
well-researched by earlier investigators (Adolph, Vereijken, &
Denny, 1998; Freedland & Berntental, 1994).
Finally, I mention several longitudinal descriptive studies
undertaken from an explicit dynamic systems perspective.
Thelen and Ulrich (1991) reported changes over the Žrst year
in infant treadmill stepping, emphasising the mechanisms
promoting transitions to better performance. Angulo-Kinzler,
Ulrich, Chapman, & Thelen (2000) followed this by tracing
the continuity between treadmill stepping and later supported
and unsupported upright locomotion, using multiple measures
of kinematics, kinetics (forces), and electromyography. The
longitudinal reaching study I mentioned earlier (Thelen et al.,
1993, 1996) was also designed to follow dynamic principles,
not only in the dense longitudinal design, but also in the
multiple measures used to capture the multiple inuences on
the task (Spencer & Thelen, 2000; Spencer, Vereijken,
Diedrich, & Thelen, 2000). Finally, in a most clever study,
GoldŽeld, Kay, and Warren (1993) used a dynamic analysis to
understand how infants learned a novel movement task,
bouncing in a Jolly-Jumper.
Here, I do not dwell on the detailed results of these
investigations. Rather, I suggest that taken together, these
contemporary studies of reaching and walking have gone
beyond the classic studies in two important ways, reecting the
inuence of Bernstein, Edelman, and dynamic systems. First,
there is more explicit consideration of the biomechanical
aspects of early movement. Theoretically, this means thinking
about movement as a biomechanical problem to be solved by
the nervous system: We cannot think about neural control
distanced from what is controlled. For instance, learning to
walk requires keeping the centre of mass of the body over a
permissible base of support and controlling the ‘‘fall’’ as the
infant steps forward. Crawling requires the correct limb
combinations to maintain a dynamic base of support. Reaching
involves stabilising one arm segment against the forces
generated by the other moving segments. In this view, the
patterns of muscle activation may well be the result of the
biomechanical demands of the movement, not the cause of the
movement. For example, Angulo-Kinzler et al. (2000)
discovered that, as Bernstein predicted, the patterns of muscle
activation underlying treadmill stepping, supported, and
independent walking in infants were much more variable than
the patterns of forces that moved the legs.
And second, contemporary researchers are considering new
ideas about variation and individual differences. From the
start, researchers in motor development have noticed, mea-
sured, and discussed individual differences. Shirley (1931), for
instance, documented the differences in onsets of various
motor skills in her 25 babies and related these differences to the
infants’ physical growth, muscle tone, and ‘‘willingness to
expend energy’’ (p. 125). Physical dimensions and movement
‘‘styles’’ are still seen as an important part of the story (Adolph,
1997; Thelen et al., 1993). Additionally, today’s researchers
are less concerned with variability around age norms than in
earlier times. Indeed, in many studies, children are compared
on the basis of their skill levels rather than their ages.
There are two ways in which variation and individual
differences have taken on new theoretical status. First, there is
increasing recognition that individual differences in body
dimensions, muscle qualities, and inherent energy levels,
provide children with different kinds of movement problems
that they must solve in order to gain skills. Low energy children
with large limbs may have to learn different adaptive strategies
than small, wiry, highly energetic ones. This emphasises the
problem-solving nature of motor skill development, that there
cannot be a rigid, phylogenetic blueprint because individuals
must Žt their own bodies to their own tasks. Second, we have
come to recognise variation itself as the source of develop-
mental change, a heritage from both dynamic systems theory
and Edelman’s selectionism. If children do not have multiple
options, they will be stuck in only a few solutions. Thus, some
investigators have reported not just their dependent variables,
but also the structure of variability as indicators of when skills
are stable and when they change (e.g., Thelen &Ulrich, 1991).
Experimental studies of early skills. One important way to
uncover processes of change is to experimentally manipulate
variables to which the system is sensitive. For example, I
mentioned previously my hypothesis that infants’ limb masses
were important in the disappearance of the stepping reex. To
test this, we changed the limb mass by submerging the infants’
legs in water or adding weights (Thelen, Fisher, & Ridley-
Johnson, 1984). More recently, the effects of biomechanics
and movement have been evaluated by changing infants’
postures (Jensen et al., 1994; Savelsbergh & van der Kamp,
1993) or by adding weights to their limbs and torsos (Adolph &
Avolio, 2000; Thelen, Skala, & Kelso, 1987). To study the
development of postural control, for example, researchers have
commonly intervened experimentally by placing infants and
children on a platform that perturbs the infants’ balance. By
 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF BEHAVIORAL DEVELOPMENT, 2000, 24 (4), 385–397
this means, researchers can test the limits of children’s postural
stability at various ages, and investigate the underlying
neuromotor mechanisms that produce the response (Woolla-
cott & Sveistrup, 1992).
I should note here that several studies have combined the
longitudinal, descriptive method with experiments by repeating
an experimental manipulation in the same infants over
different ages. A most elegant example of this is Adolph’s
(1997) study of infants climbing up and down slopes, where
she followed babies from the onset of crawling through stable
independent walking. At each visit, Adolph assessed their
abilities to judge climbable slopes with a psychophysical
measurement on slopes of different grades. Similarly, An-
gulo-Kinzler et al. (2000) tested infants in three locomotor
contexts varying in support from eight months until they were
walking well.
Studies in perception-action coupling. Although all motor
development studies are perception-action studies, experi-
ments explicitly in the Gibsonian tradition continue to
dominate the Želd. Here the issue is not so much motor
control per se, but how action is modulated by perception, and
in turn, how action informs perception. For example, early
work by Lee and Aronson (1974) and Butterworth and Hicks
(1977) established the dominance of vision in toddlers’
postural control by using the famous ‘‘moving room’’ para-
digm. This situation was later extended and reŽned by
Bertenthal and Bai (1989) with younger infants and also used
by Stoffregen, Schmuckler, and Gibson (1987) to show that
infants were sensitive to peripheral visual ow. Since then,
there has been considerable debate over the relative impor-
tance of vision and proprioception in the control of posture. In
their review, Bertenthal and Clifton (1998) concluded that the
balance between multiple sources of information may be
contextually determined, much like the soft-assembly of action
I described earlier.
The role of perception in prehension has also been a topic of
intense study. Early researchers, including Piaget (1952),
Bruner (1973), and White, Castle, and Held (1964) stressed
the necessity of infants gradually learning to match the sight of
their hands with the sight of the objects to be reached.
Questions about this gradual visual-visual matching arose with
von Hofsten’s (1982) report of infants’ directed reaches during
the newborn period, before a long period of learning
commenced. Recently, Clifton, Muir, Ashmead, & Clarkson
(1993) further challenged the visual-matching idea by showing
that at Žrst, infants reached as well in the dark to a lighted or
sounding object as when they could see their hands. This work
underscored the importance of learning the ‘‘feel’’ as well as
the sight of the arm and hand.
Over the Žrst year, infants are not only better able to reach a
target, they become increasingly skilled in anticipating the
location and size of objects. Notable work in this area includes
von Hofsten and Ronnqvist’s (1988) descriptions of the
development of anticipatory hand shaping and Ashmead,
McCarty, Lucas, & Belvedere’s (1993) demonstration of
infants’ abilities to adjust movements ‘‘online’’. McCarty,
Clifton, and Collard (1999) investigated infants’ discovery of
the correct way to grip a spoon. In a particularly clever
experiment, they presented the spoon in varying orientations to
see when and how infants could anticipate and perform the
appropriate grip.
The studies I have mentioned so far have looked at how
393
infants use perception to adjust movements. But the converse
is also true: Children use actions to inform perception,
primarily through the use of exploratory movements (Gibson,
1988). For instance, when confronted with an unfamiliar
surface, infants, unsure of the suitability of the surface for
locomotion, will use their hands to touch and pat (Adolph,
1997; Gibson et al., 1987). Bushnell and Boudreau (1993)
provide an excellent illustration. They show how infants’
perceptual detection of the properties of objects such as weight,
texture, or sounding abilities, develops only as their motor
abilities are sufŽcient to manipulate the objects appropriately.
In sum, we have learned a great deal about development in
general through the experimental study of perception and
action. In particular, this work has emphasised the continual
active role of children in exploring their environments, and the
context-dependent, problem-solving process that constitutes
developmental change. Many of the old ideas about develop-
mental timetables can now be recast in different terms. Instead
of a phylogenetically determined sequence of stages, develop-
ment is better conceptualised as a changing landscape of
patterns, whose stability depends not only on the organic status
of the child, but also on their experiential history, and how
those interact with the particular task at hand. AŽnal example
makes the point well. In his classic work, Gesell described a
series of grip conŽgurations infants used to grasp a cube,
ranging from a simple scoop to the Žne pincer grasp. Newell
and colleagues (1989) looked at the grasping task in a new way.
They reasoned that for a young infant, a one-inch cube
presented a different task, based on the infant’s hand size, than
to an older infant or an adult. Indeed, they discovered that
infants were much more adaptable, depending on the cube
size, with young infants using more appropriate grasping
patterns than previously thought possible. In short, the baby
could ‘‘soft-assemble’’ a solution matching their own skill level
to the demands of the task.
Cognition and motor skill development. A Žnal area gaining in
prominence is the intersection between perception-action and
cognition. Views on the relationship between these two
domains have been complex. For many years, motor skill and
cognition were believed to be unrelated because early studies
showed only modest correlation, if any, between children’s
motor and intellectual development (e.g., Shirley, 1931). (Of
course, this has always been a contentious issue, because,
especially in infancy ‘‘mental’’ test items have an enormous
motor component, e.g., Bayley, 1936.) On the other hand,
Gesell believed that both domains were governed by the same
developmental principles. For Piaget, cognition was built from
perception and action, and Piaget’s descriptions of how early
motor skills, such as reaching and sucking, are used in the
service of developing cognition are still among our most
insightful.
Today, there is little interest in using motor development to
predict later mental status, but there is increasing agreement
with Piaget of the tight linkage between movement and
cognitive development. The work of Bertenthal and Campos
and their colleagues has been especially inuential in this
regard (e.g., Bertenthal &Campos, 1990; Berthental, Campos,
&Barrett, 1984). These scholars argue that one setting event—
the onset of crawling—initiates a developmental cascade that
has consequences for changes in spatial cognition and
emotional development. The mechanisms, by which being
able to move about changes the ways that babies think, are not
394 THELEN / MOTOR DEVELOPMENT: THE FUTURE OF DEVELOPMENTAL PSYCHOLOGY
fully understood, but may involve their increased attention to
perceptual information as they move about. In other words,
movement helps children sample the world more completely.
There is, perhaps, even a more basic way in which
movement and cognition are tightly linked, a way close to
what Piaget envisioned (Thelen, 2000). Infants, children, and
adults are perceiving and moving all of their waking hours.
Movement itself is a form of perception because the
proprioceptive and haptic senses are continuously receiving
information, information that is perfectly coupled with
information from the external senses such as vision and
hearing. Thus, movement is an integral part of the ensemble
of all our experience, including the times when we are just
looking at something, because looking involves movements of
the eyes, head, and neck. If, in the Piagetian sense, higher
cognition is built from sensorimotor experiences, then the
movement that occurs with those experiences is remembered
and recalled to the same degree as information from the other
perceptual senses. Even as mental events become more
abstracted from the immediacy of the senses with develop-
ment, they never become fully disassociated from the
sensorimotor events that produced them (Edelman, 1987;
Thelen, 2000). Indeed the hallmark of a skilled person is the
ability to process efŽciently both ‘‘online’’ and ‘‘ofine’’ and to
be able to switch between these modes as the situation
demands. I have argued (Thelen, 2000; Thelen et al, in press)
that this exibility demands that action and mental events be
encoded in the same dynamic language so that they can be
tightly intermeshed, and that this encoding is there from the
start.
An agenda for the future: It is not just motor
any longer
Today, motor development is a robust Želd, with strong
theoretical bases and empirical work of great sophistication.
The continued strength of the Želd in the future. I believe, lies
both in our abilities to pursue important issues within the Želd
and, at the same time, to tie motor development with advances
in other, related disciplines. In this concluding section, I offer
some thoughts about these future directions.
Multimodal perception and action. We have made great strides
in understanding the role of visual perception in the develop-
ment of reaching, posture, and locomotion. But, as I discussed
above, experience is continually multimodal, including the
perception of movement. Much less is known about how
infants and children use correlated information from multiple
sources, especially in decisions to act (but see, for instance,
Streri & Pêcheux, 1986).
Formal models and robotics. The processes involved in motor
development are excellent candidates for a variety of types of
computational and dynamic models, as well as implementation
in robots. Modelling of any type offers the opportunity to think
more precisely about the phenomenon in question, and to
generate testable hypotheses about the processes involved.
There is already considerable progress towards this end (see,
for instance, Newell & Molenaar, 1998). Examples inspired
explicitly by dynamic systems theory include Robertson’s
(1993; Robertson, Cohen, & Mayer-Kress, 1993) dynamic
analysis of the time structure of fetal and infant movements,
Bertenthal, Boker, & Rose’s (1995) dynamic analysis of infant
postural control, GoldŽeld et al.’s (1993) work on infants
learning the Jolly-Jumper, Fitzpatrick, Schmidt, and Lock-
man’s (1996) analysis of children learning to clap, and Thelen
et al.’s (in press) dynamic Želd model of infant perseverative
reaching. Other notable efforts are Taga’s (1995) model of the
development of locomotion, and Berthier’s (1996) simulations
of infants learning to reach. The models of Sporns and
Edelman (1993; Almassy, Edelman, & Sporns, 1998) are
implemented both on the computer and in an autonomous
mobile robot. Indeed, there is considerable interest in the
‘‘developmental’’ aspects of such robots, and especially how
perception and action work together to produce emergent
adaptive behaviour (Pfeifer & Scheier, 1999).
Embodied cognition. There is a great need for studying the role
of movement in so-called ‘‘higher’’ cognition—memory,
decision making, categorisation, and language. For example,
Thelen, Smith, and colleagues have demonstrated the role of
body memory in a classic Piagetian task, the A-not-B error
(Smith, Thelen, Titzer, & McLin, 1998; Thelen et al., in
press). They showed that when infants reach several times to
one of two targets, they build up a location memory of the
target that also includes the feel of the arms and infants’
postural set, and that these memories inuence further
decisions to reach. This is a clear demonstration that move-
ment is not separate from remembering and deciding, which
are traditionally considered ‘‘cognitive’’ processes. These
authors suggest that movement must be considered as part of
every task: What aspects of movements that accompany
everyday actions are remembered and encoded as part of the
task ensemble?
A very promising entry into this question lies in the area of
speech and gesture. Infants produce interpretable gestures
many months before they speak, and of course, gestures are
universal in older children and adults. Until recently, gestures
were considered as by-products of speech, or augmented
communication. Now the motor aspects of both gesture and
speech are being reconsidered, especially the deep coupling
between hand gestures and cognition. There is also consider-
able evidence that control of hand and mouth are both
phylogenetically and ontogenetically linked, and that indeed
language acts are profoundly embodied (Iverson & Thelen,
1999).
Neural bases of motor skill development. The Želd of ‘‘develop-
mental cognitive neuroscience’’ is just coming into its own
(e.g., Nelson, in press). Current neuroimaging and direct
recording techniques are not well adapted to studying large
movements in normal young human subjects. However,
scientists have used other approaches to better understand
brain correlates of skill development. For example, several
research programmes are following groups of infants, largely
prematurely born, who have suffered well-characterised,
perinatal brain lesions. Many show considerable recovery of
function while still others do not attain fully functional
outcomes (see review in Elman et al., 1996).
Such studies raise profound issues both about early
plasticity and the effects of experience, but also about the old
ideas of localisation of function, because it is apparent that
when there is injury to one part of the brain, other areas can
assume needed functions. It is hoped that as collaborations
between neuroscientists and developmentalists increase, and
 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF BEHAVIORAL DEVELOPMENT, 2000, 24 (4), 385–397
with inevitable technical advances, this exciting area of brain-
behaviour interface will grow at a rapid pace.
Learning and plasticity. The explosion of interest in learning
and plasticity in the neurosciences has already reverberated in
our Želd. There is already a large and detailed literature
devoted to motor learning and plasticity in human adults and
nonhuman primates. Unfortunately, as yet, few of these
Žndings have been extended to infants and children, although
they are highly relevant. For example, Shadmehr and
colleagues (e.g., Shadmehr & Mussa-Ivaldi, 1994) have
conducted elegant studies examining how adults learn novel
motor tasks, what is remembered from these newly learned
tasks, and then how the newly learned task competes with
previously learned ones. This is a good model for learning new
skills as infants and children, yet much work needs to be done
(but see Adolph, 1997, for a good example of competing
skills.)
Cultural and individual differences. Individual and cultural
differences in learning motor skills are as important as the
commonalities that children share. Such differences inform us
about the plasticity of developmental pathways, and the
inuences and limits of daily experience in shaping them. All
cultures and all intact individuals learn to sit, walk, reach and
manipulate, and speak, but what are the diverse means of
attaining similar ends? For example, work by Bril and
colleagues (e.g., Bril & Sabatier, 1986) has documented child
care practices and beliefs in Mali, which differ markedly from
Western cultures, with the suggestion that they may contribute
to differences in motor skill development. Campos and
colleagues (2000) have undertaken a large project in China
investigating the consequences of cultural restrictions on
crawling, especially on spatial cognition. This remains an
understudied area of motor development, likely due to the
difŽculties of collecting cross-cultural data, but one with great
potential for helping us understand deep developmental issues.
Conclusion
The study of motor development is alive and vigorous at the
turn of the century, perhaps reviving and reliving its old golden
age. It has again returned to the mainstream of developmental
psychology, but the Želd also has extensions, as I have shown,
into new Želds, including neuroscience, cognitive science, and
motor science. Moreover, the theoretical and empirical work of
the last two decades is reshaping clinical practice dealing with
perceptual-motor disorders in infants and children.
I believe, as in other Želds of psychology, real progress will
be made in the next millennium, only as we continue to
combine our traditional naturalistic and experimental ap-
proaches with insights from other disciplines. This will work in
two ways. First, we will learn more about the development of
perception and action as we bring in information and
techniques from neuroscience, cognitive science, clinical
practice, and the like. But I also think we will take leadership
in the 21st century as we continue to show the centrality of
movement in other domains of psychological interest. Finally,
we offer models of how development can truly be studied as a
time-dependent process.
Manuscript received June 1999
Revised manuscript received July 1999
395
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