Starting early in prenatal life, progressive, and sometimes regressive, changes in recognizable movement and postural patterns from simple to more complex forms of organization, associated with growth, maturation and experience. Theoretically, the study of motor development, largely through the application of dynamical systems thinking starting in the 1990s, involves a number of issues such the how the couplings between movement, perception and posture develop, the degrees of freedom problem and the dual state problem (i.e., how the developing child discovers the dynamics of coordination while at the same time learning to control the system). The development of action is now integrated with, for example, the cognitive and social domains through the medium of theories of embodiment and in which movement is seen as a ‘final common pathway’ for the attainment of achievements in such domains.
See Action, Ages and Stages Questionnaire (ASQ), Antagonist muscle, Bayley Scales of Infant and Toddler Development, Biomechanical degrees of freedom problem, Biomechanical degrees of freedom problem, Degrees of freedom (or Bernstein’s) problem, Dynamical systems approaches, Embodiment, Final common pathway, Handedness (bimanual versus unimanual), Laws of nature, Motor ability, Motor control, Motor learning, Motor milestone, Motor Performance Study (Michigan State University), Motor skill, Movement, Movement coordination, Perception-action coupling