Motor Development
Ten subjects participated in a children's block stacking exercise. The children's age ranged from eighteen-months to six-years-old. Four of those subjects were male. Six subjects were female. The following description of the block stacking demonstration shows the development of the children's abilities over time. The eighteen-month-old male subject demonstrated some interest in the stacking exercise. He quickly stacked a total of two blocks then his attention was no longer directed on the exercise. The two-year-old male slowly stacked a total of nine blocks using one hand and an overhand grip. He was very focused and could either stack or speak but not at the same time. One of the two three-year-old female subjects was very anxious to stack the blocks. She slowly stacked a total of eleven blocks using two hands, one hand at a time and also made small adjustments to the tower she was building. The other three-year-old female was very serious and used a two-hand method in the same manner as the other three-year-old female. She paid very close attention to detail and used an overhand grip. She stacked a total of twelve blocks. The three-year-old male subject was excited and very social. He, too, was an
The role of perception in prehension has also been a topic of intense study such as the necessity of infants gradually learning to match the sight of their hands with the sight of the objects to be matched. Clifton further challenged the visual-matching idea by showing that at first, infants reach 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 (Clifton, Muir, Ashmead, & Clarkson, 1993). Today, motor development is a strong field, with compelling theoretical bases and empirical work of amazing sophistication. Researchers continue to reveal other interesting areas of application for motor development. Another area gaining in prominence is the intersection between perception-action and cognition. For many years, motor skill and cognition were believed to be unrelated due to early studies that showed only moderate correlation between children's motor and intellectual development. However, Gesell believed that both domains were governed by the same developmental principles. According to Piaget, cognition was built from perception and action, and his descriptions of how early motor skills are used in the service of developing cognition are still among the most intuitive yet. There is a way that is close to what Piaget envisioned in which movement and cognition are strongly linked. Movement in 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 hearing and vision. Thus, movement is an integral part of the ensemble of all our experience. If, in the Piagetian sense, higher cognition is built from sensorimotor experiences, then the movement that occurs with those experiences is remembered and recalled just the same as information from other perceptual senses (Thelen, 2000). Cratty (1990) suggest that at least 3 major dimensions of the motor behavior of drug-stressed infants need definitive assessment. These dimensions are 1) tremors, 2) spasmodic single-cycle (jerking) behaviors, and 3) variations in tonus. New research strategies and assessment tools functioning at both the biochemical and behavioral levels are suggested to aid caretakers and clinicians. These include longitudinal studies; assessment instruments that can survey tremors, tonus abnormalities, and spasmodic actions. Researchers today still carry on the heritage of early researchers such as Gesell and McGraw by utilizing detailed, longitudinal studies as the foundation for understanding motor skill development. These studies are also used to infer developmental changes in the underlying mechanisms
Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 1992
Approximate Pages = 8 (250 words per page double spaced)
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