Youtube daily motor Feb 1 2017

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- The debate of nature versus nurture is one

that has continually perplexed scientists, parents,

and students alike.

Conflicting views over innate abilities compared

to those that we acquire and learn from our environment

has fueled many debates in development.

- The question of nature versus nurture holds additional

relevance in the world of motor development

where individuals are born with 99%

of the same genetic material,

but still acquire and express motor skills

with varying levels of competency.

What causes the twins to be different?

Were they born with different skills or was their exact same

training a different experience for each child?

What makes the child from the other family able

to throw the ball exactly the same as the one twin?

Were these two born with a similar gift,

or did they both learn a skill in a similar way?

- These are great questions and they barely skim

the surface of the highly dense

and potentially heated nature versus nurture debate.

Since motor development is not limited to one domain

but rather visible in different environments

and stages of life, it is vital to explore the nature

versus nurture debate from numerous areas.

In the Motor Development the question of interest is whether

our motor behavior is a product of motor skill developed by

practicing over and over again or a result

of our motor ability, which is genetically determined?

But to answer this question, we first need to differentiate

the concept of motor skills and motor ability.

Motor skills are defined as activities or tasks that require

movement to achieve a specific purpose or goal,

and this is the nurture perspective.

Differently, ability is a stable trait or capacity

of the individual that is a determinant of a person's

potential to perform specific skills.

Abilities are generally thought to be genetically determined

and by large, unmodified by experience

and this is the nature perspective

But what make us different with respect

to our motor behavior?

- Yes, what does make us different

with respect to our motor behavior?

Are genetic blueprints or abilities the reason why

we all cannot reach the same level of motor performance?

Let's look into a few studies that show some evidences about

what causes motor skills to develop.

The results of these experiments can help us to understand

what stimuli are both necessary

and sufficient to cause change.

The first one is a study performed by Meltzof and Moore.

The study was about infant's facial imitation.

In 1977, Science published the ground-breaking paper

Imitation of Facial and Manual Gestures by Human Neonates.

The experiment showed infant imitation of adults

at a much earlier age than was thought possible.

They showed that infants between 12 and 21 days of age

can imitate both facial and manual gestures.

This behavior cannot be explained in terms of either

conditioning or innate releasing mechanisms.

Such imitation implies that human neonates can equate

their own unseen behaviors with gestures

they see others perform.

- But when we look at the results, we should verify if all

neonates were capable or not of imitating facial

expressions without previous learning opportunities?

The answer is not all of them.

The average of 18 of 40 neonates always imitated.

The average of 17.5 of 40 sometimes imitated.

The average of 4.5 of 40 never imitated.

Yes, it was demonstrated that this behavior can be observed

frequently in extremely young humans.

It could be interpreted to mean that facial imitation

and very complex behavior has innate elements.

How else would these results have been found?

Myrtle McGraw also developed another

wonderful study in 1939.

In this classical experiment McGraw compared the appearance

of motor milestones in twins,

both of them were in the same environment, in the daycare.

One was trained.

Johnny learned rollerskating, swimming, problem-solving,

climbing, and other activities.

Another one, Jimmy, was untrained.

He spent the whole time with nurses in daycare and received

similar attention but not special active training.

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McGraw's findings were very interesting.

She found that Jimmy and Johnny achieved

the motor milestones at about the same age.

However, the quality of the movements

was dramatically different.

If you look at this movie, you will see how different

the movements were.

It makes you wonder, is this nature or nurture?

- Considering the possibility of both nature and nurture

Super and colleagues studied child-rearing

practices in Kenya.

Super investigated if children from the same tribe

but raised with different cultural practices

would achieve their motor milestones at the same age.

So, he studied children from both Kenyan villages in urban

and rural environments and children in western cultures.

They hypothesized that,

if nature Kenyan's genetic heritage should predominate

and there will be no differences between the rural

and urban environments.

If nurture environment will predominate and there will be no

differences between urban Kenyans and Western Children.

Let's look into the results.

Rural infants sat, stood and walked.

Four to six weeks sooner than their Western counterparts.

Urban infants sat, stood and walked.

Two to three weeks sooner than their Western counterparts

but behind the Rural Kenyan infants.

So what is it, nature or nurture?

- Well Kristin, we may be asking the question the wrong way.

It may be not just nature or nurture.

It is the interaction between them.

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For more infomation >> Nature Vs. Nurture: The Motor Development Debate - Duration: 10:37.

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The Mountain of Motor Development: A Metaphor... - Duration: 22:26.

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- So I began teaching motor development

having never had a course on motor development

and having taken many courses in child development

in which, in most of the textbooks at the time,

had these long lists of things of

three-year-olds will do these things,

four-year-olds will do these things.

And of course, the students that you're

teaching are trying to figure out

whether you have to memorize that list.

So it was always a standard question in class,

do I have to know that list in the book

that shows all the things a four-year-old can do?

And so I got relatively frustrated with these

lists of things that characterize children's

motor behavior.

So that was the first thing.

The second thing is, of course,

was there was a lot in the literature about

how to think about development

and how to get the idea of

the characteristics of something that is developmental.

And so I read a paper once by a

very famous development psychologist by the name of

Jerome Bruner.

This was when I was in graduate school.

And Bruner made an allusion that

developmental process, or development, was much like

climbing a mountain.

And I really liked this idea. I thought, okay yeah

of course you have some place where you're going,

the what we call the teleological goal.

and we have this idea that

there's a…

where you start walking up the mountain

and sort of go up, if you think about mountain climbers

in Kilimanjaro, or something, they talk about

the base camp.

And then they get up the mountain to another

level of the mountain climbing.

And so, each one is sort of a place that sort of,

stop-off place.

So you have this kind of idea of periods, or stages

that you're climbing.

So all that seemed to sort of fit.

And, quite frankly, I can't remember the day I decided

to say in class, "Motor development is like climbing

a mountain."

I always say, that we're talking about the development

of motor skills.

I don't think we're just talking about

any motor behavior,

but that the whole idea is to understand

the development of skillful motor behavior.

And so the idea of a mountain gives you a very good

conceptualization of that, that is you're

going to some end, that is to the top of the mountain.

The idea of the mountain range

came actually from talking with my graduate students.

Who, we started talking about, well this looks like

it's only one thing, wonder if I

don't go up the mountain, on these fundamental skills.

I wonder if I do piano playing,

or I wonder if I am a skilled speaker

of multiple languages, or something.

How do you characterize that? And in conversations

with my students, my graduate students, who came

up with this idea that

it's a mountain range,

it isn't just like one Kilimanjaro, but actually many

mountains that you climb.

Some of us never get up any of them, like I

can't say that I ever got up the gymnastics mountain.

But, some other people would say they never got up

the tennis mountain, or something like that.

There's change over time, like learning a motor skill

or adapting your motor skill to an environmental change

is of course, fundamental to everything we do.

But when you look at the mountain, you see that

it isn't just like two or three steps.

Which would be like adaptation to like get over

a stone, or to go up this little path

to go to that little place

in your life.

But the mountain really gives you the impression

that this is a big and long process.

So it's not like just going down the street.

Which might be considered motor learning, if you would.

Or just going up 500 feet

up the mountain.

It's the whole mountain.

And so therefore, the first thing you sort of have

to appreciate is that the mountain speaks to you

just straightforwardly, this is a big deal.

This is a long process.

It's a lifetime.

And, that's

probably it.

The other part is that it's cumulative.

So you have to go up one base camp

leads to the next base camp

which leads to the next

which is the reflexive period

leads to the pre-adapted, and so on.

Each of these is built upon the next one.

It's sequential.

Like you can't kind of, well you can kind of

go up and down it, but there's a natural

sort of sequence to the order.

And of course, it's the expression teleological—

one of my students' favorites words—

but meaning that there is some end state

and that's, of course, the top of the mountain.

So I think it fits very nicely with that developmental

perspective.

First you have to say, okay,

motor development is like climbing this mountain.

So what does that mean?

Well, I have to do something, I have to be an actor.

I have to be the person who does the climbing.

So that's an action, that's a process.

And then there's the, how far did I get?

Which is the product.

So I could say, okay, how did I get there?

And then, how far did I get?

That would be like a period, so now I'm gonna

fundamental motor patterns period.

Or now I'm in the context specific period,

or something like that.

That's where I got, but how did I get there?

Then of course, give you all these little ways

to tell the story.

So the story is, we're going to try to climb

up the mountain.

So when climbing up the mountain

you have to have this action, okay,

that's a process, that's what you're doing.

And then you have, where did you get, the product?

The other thing though, this is the combination

with dynamical systems, and that is that

you have the constraints.

So, I have what face of the mountain was I born

on kind of thing?

So you could say, well, I got the

north face of the mountain to climb up.

Or I got to a certain period, and all of a sudden

I encountered some very strong constraints

as I tried to learn, in my case, gymnastics

or something like that.

That's, I think of that is like a mountain wall

that I had to go up.

The other thing is, of course, how

about me, the person.

Where is my fitness level?

So one of the things that makes it

very difficult for people to climb mountains

is that when the air changes,

if you think about like the highest mountains

in the world, these become very difficult

to negotiate at the very top

because the air is so thin.

Well, the same is true about skillfulness.

It's very hard, at the very top,

at the very peak of your motor performance.

It's hard work at that point.

You can see children who are

very young, well before 10 or 11 years of age,

be very skillful at something,

but, not in all

activities.

If there's a heavy cognitive component

such as strategies,

then I think you'll see that it takes until

they're much older before they can attain skillfulness.

But you take something like swimming

or gymnastics, I mean, how many of us have seen

some little five-year-old do back flip-flops

and you're like, "Whoa, they can do these gymnastics tricks."

But, I'm not saying that doesn't take cognition

to be a gymnast, but

there's no strategy to match your back flip-flops

to somebody else's back flip-flop.

So you can do your summersaults without having to

play a zone defense, such as in basketball.

So in basketball, you can become better and better

but it requires you to understand

more very technical levels of the game rules

and technical

levels of defense and offense strategies.

And as that ramps up, so if you could think of this

as a continuum that, here's how much

there is in terms of cognitive demand in a task

and here's the level of co-ordination needed,

well, if this, if these go together, then it would

you could be there much earlier in your skillfulness.

Like, eating food. I mean, in children

that doesn't require a lot of cognition.

Children are able to

use chopsticks very skillfully,

for example, at maybe six or seven years of age.

You don't have to wait until they're 12 years old

or something like that.

Whereas if we were talking about playing

a very complicated sports

behavior,

I'll just go back to basketball.

It may take a long time.

The other thing you have to remember is that some

of our sports are not scaled

to the child.

So you'll never be really fast in swimming

if you're always gonna do 50 meters.

And your little tiny body

and you have smaller muscles.

But if we were to make the meter, if we made the pool

the same sort of scale to their heights

and their capabilities

they might be very fast.

If you, and the best example that comes to mind is

basketball, where the net

is scaled to adults, and is not placed at a level

that's scaled to the child's height.

So I don't think

I don't think we should be thinking that it's age

it's roughly age-related, but it's really the

capabilities of the individual.

And that those capabilities are

kind of mapped pretty closely to the child's

age, cognition being the example.

But a father or a mother could

teach a child the strategies

and they could work on them

and they could get very good at those strategies.

They could become very skillful at some of the

these activities that have a cognitive load

that's higher than the motoric load.

If somebody worked on this.

Well if you do the calculations for using

Erikson's idea that it has to be

10,000 hours.

If you do the math on that

it's about 10 years.

And I always say, it's not surprising

that your insurance changes

at around 25 years of age

because it probably maps pretty well to

the number of hours that you've done driving your car.

Probably a better measure of giving you

your insurance rates would be to have

a meter on how many times,

how many hours you've driven a car

so that some people could have

reduced rates sooner, because they drive a lot.

And some people would wait 'til they were 30

because they don't drive a car very often.

I mean I think, I don't think we really scale that

to the number of hours, but you could certainly

do that in the same way that they

like a pedometer, it could just track how often you do.

They do that with airplane pilots.

In fact, that's a good example.

Airplane pilots get certain degrees of their

pilot license based on how many hours that they

clock as a pilot.

You could do the same thing with….

So it's easier to monitor an airplane because

it goes up in the air, and so on

as opposed to a car.

But you could easily put this into play

if we were serious about it.

Oh yeah, can we get stuck on a mountain, of course.

I'm stuck on gymnastics. (laughs)

And gymnasts generally are stuck on

not playing racquetball. (laughs)

Ball skills.

Yes.

Obviously your

family, friends,

culture, school environment all

scaffold what you end up doing.

And of course, if you're not good at something

then you kind of look for something

that you might be better at.

Millions of children participate in

youth sport leagues

in America.

For the first, from about eight to 10 years of age.

And then, they just

kind of stop, many of them

because they're not picked to be on the teams

or they're not good enough.

So what you have, this is another metaphor

that comes to, you know, that metaphor for the mountain.

Is the mountain is like a pyramid, or a triangle.

And you have

at the beginning everybody has a reflexive

behavior, everybody has

pre-adaptive behaviors.

We all go through this fundamental motor skill.

But this sort of narrowing also suggests

how many people get there too.

So, that skillfulness at one level

at least if we took the skillfulness mountain

for tennis, not very many people get there.

But if we took the skillfulness mountain for speaking

maybe it would be a very broad plateau at the top

there would be lots of people at that level.

So yeah, you can definitely get stuck on the mountain.

That's really about the constraints that

play into your life.

And your own interests and motivation

but those are really, your interests and motivation

are really

diminished or enhanced by your friends and family.

Well the proficiency barrier's a very good

concept given to us by Vern Seyfeld.

In contemporary terms we call this the glass ceiling.

(laughs)

In motor skills, it's

there's a certain

accumulated ignorance that can happen.

So you accumulate knowledge

so you get better and better and better.

And then you get to a certain point that

if you have not

if you've not worked out the patterns of coordination

for some behaviors, then it's gonna be a major

rate limiter to you being able to become proficient

at the next level.

And the best example of this, that I always give

and it's sexist, I'm sorry,

is what we call the sort of

throwing pattern, that is epitomized by

inventory throwers, and often sometimes called

the little girl's throw.

If I weren't sitting in this chair I would do this

pattern of action, which is the stepping with

the right foot, and throwing with the right foot.

This is just an inventor pattern.

It's unfortunate that it's been characterized as a

girl's throw.

But that just means that girls didn't throw balls

as much as boys.

It's not genetically wired into anybody.

Everyone throws like that at some point in their life.

But if that's where you're stuck in your fundamental

pattern of behavior.

If that's the pattern that you have

that is, you step with your right foot

and you throw with your right foot instead of having

the contralateral stepping,

and the good trunk action.

So if your trunk action is mostly

forward and back, and not pelvis

and then shoulder go in rotation.

If you haven't worked that out, when you go to tennis

you can't do a tennis serve very well.

You can't strike, do a good striking behavior in batting.

And so that

not mastering those patterns of coordination

are gonna rate limit your ability to get higher.

Sure, you can play tennis.

But you're not gonna play tennis at a level

that's gonna really rank you any higher

than sort of an advanced beginner.

You can become kind of very good at some level

but your tennis serve is always gonna be

hampered by that.

And your golf swing is gonna be hampered by those

patterns of coordination.

Even more fundamental than that is that

one of the things that you really appreciate

if you become a physical therapist

and people in physical education, may not appreciate

as much, and that is the role of posture.

And its control in the fundamental patterns

of coordination.

That is your ability to manage your head

and your trunk and your arms

over top of your legs while you're doing

all of these other behaviors.

And that's also really managed and worked out

in the fundamental patterns period.

Now you want to go on

to get to another level

and you're just gonna keep banging into

this sort of glass ceiling.

Because you don't have the patterns

of coordination worked at this level

that will allow you easily to go to the next level.

So, it's a good concept really.

You can do workarounds but it's not

it's not sweet.

You need to go back actually and get those

fundamental patterns worked out.

How would an atypical person climb the mountain?

Atypically. (laughs)

An atypical person would

comes with different set of constraints.

And when you come with a different set of constraints

it will

create a new

challenge for you.

The mountain is— the environment will stay the same.

The task may stay the same in the sense that

you want to get someplace.

But, the way in which you achieve this

is gonna be driven by your

individual organism constraints.

So, let's just take the

person who has Cerebral Palsy.

And does a lot of toe walking.

It's not that they, first of all, they'll walk later.

And they might have some spasticity in their hands.

So the behaviors that they have

need to be compensated, they need to

change the from what we see as typical behaviors

into behaviors that work for their biological

or their organism constraints.

And that's what physical therapists and occupational

therapists do every day is work within the

individual's structural constraints, functional constraints

to try to allow them to achieve the task in a different way.

So, can they get to skillful?

Well, you know, depends on I suppose what it is.

Children who have Down Syndrome, for example,

become skillful at things that don't require

a heavy cognitive load.

But, we have the Special Olympics, which is

is a celebration

of skillful behavior with

strong constraints that are different than

everybody else has.

So I think the Special Olympics celebrates the fact

that there are lots of ways to achieve

successful motor behavior.

And a measure of skillfulness within those constraints.

So I guess I'd say, yeah, they're not gonna be

on the US Olympic team.

But we have the example of Pistorius, I think his

name is, was the man who had the amputated leg

and had a prosthetic.

And, he had worked out a running pattern with his

spring prosthetic.

And then the question became

is that legitimate?

Can he compete against people who don't

have that springy leg?

So, I don't know.

(laughs)

I don't know that I have

I guess I would have to say

people would have to give me some feedback as they use it.

There's a lot that's not in the paper

or either of the two papers.

That's sort of just the way I've used it myself.

Other people, the nice thing about publishing something is

people that can read it and take it

for their own use, and see how they would

use it, or not use it, or extend upon it.

I would hope that

there'd be like a "Mountain Two" paper that would come out

with people commenting on how it works

and how it doesn't work.

Where they need to think about it.

Remember, it's only a model, it's not a theory.

And a model is only useful.

And if it's not useful, get another model.

If this model doesn't work for you

in the way you conceptualize motor development

then get another model.

So, models are really just a concrete something.

Concrete form

of something you're trying to understand

that's an abstract concept.

So motor development is, what is that?

It's an abstract idea at one level.

And so the mountain, and the classes, like the skills

and you have all this stuff.

So the mountain you just kind of keep

coming back to it and saying,

well where are we on the mountain?

And, have we gotten from the fundamental period

up to the contact specific period?

Have we got past that base camp, where are we?

And if that works for you, that's great.

If it doesn't, get another model. (laughs)

I look forward to that.

Developing skillfulness is a

is a big process, a long process,

a high process.

It doesn't get done in a day.

You can't climb a mountain in a day.

Not the lifetime model, mountain.

So,

besides all the other stuff I've just said I'd say

look at the mountain and go, can I get that done in a day?

No.

Does it take me 10,000 hours?

I don't know about that, or 10 years.

Hopefully it doesn't take you 10 years to climb a mountain.

But, if you think of it as a mountain range

and you say, I have to climb a lot of mountains.

It's not just the mountain for tennis,

or the mountain for

driving your car, or something.

It's all the mountains that I have to climb.

Then, in fact— or the peaks, mountain peaks—

then in fact, you can see even more clearly that

it's a

lifetime process.

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For more infomation >> The Mountain of Motor Development: A Metaphor... - Duration: 22:26.

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Fundamentals Concepts and Characteristics of Motor Development - Duration: 14:58.

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- What is development?

What is motor development,

and why development is considered to be a lifespan process?

And what are the main characteristics

of the lifespan perspective?

In this episode, we will try to answer these questions,

and we also provide some definitions

of few terms that will be critical

for this motor development course.

So let's start reviewing the broad concepts

for what is development.

Development is considered to be

a lifespan process of changes.

The observed patters in the underlying process

of behavioral, emotional and cognitive change

that begins at conception

and continues throughout the lifespan until death.

Many professionals may be interested in development,

and several could be specifically interested

in motor development.

Physical educators for example,

may be interested in which practices work best,

and whether selective tests are developmentally appropriate

or not for a particular child or group of children.

Therapists would want to know the factors

that affect movement of babies,

or how individual changes that happened

during an early period of life

would help rehabilitate the same individual

that have, for example,

a stroke during his adulthood.

Bioengineers and designers may be interested in spaces,

control panels, work environment,

sport gear, and smart prosthetics.

Health care providers might want to determine

how skill development and exercise habits early in life

affect health status later in your life.

Development is broadly defined as

a gradual progression from a relatively simple

to a later and more complex form.

It can happen in three different domains,

motor, cognitive, and affective,

or also known as a social emotional.

Remember, cognitive refers to our intellectual behavior,

involves decision making, language,

numeric reasoning, information processing, et cetera.

Affective is our social and emotional behavior.

It is how and why we play our emotional physiology,

friendship, parent-child interactions,

emotional disorders such as depression,

or anti-social behavior.

Motor, which is the emphasis of this course,

involves body movements and motor skill performance.

It refers to posture control and performance

of motor actions such as walking, reaching,

and it also relates to all sensory-motor interactions

and the biomechanics of human movements.

While movement is inherent in our lives,

any change across time are inevitable.

A good example would be to explore

what are the change that happening

during the process of learning a motor action.

For example, let's think about how we change

from a stand-alone position

to learn how to walk independently.

You may think that learning to walk

independently is trivial,

and because you have already your ability to walk around,

you would even take this movement for granted.

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A great way to show uniqueness and great ability

of humans to become skillful

is to closely watch the limit space by bioengineers

in developing robots that are human-like.

Let's watch this brief documentary from Honda

called the Power of Dreams.

There is a part of this video when researchers show

they struggle in replicating what are considered to be

a very common and earlier developed human motor skill,

the human gait.

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- Nearly all the robots that have been developed so far

are tools that are adjunct to existing human faculties.

There's been a co-evolution between humans and their tools

dating back to when our first ancestor, Homo habilis,

picked up a rock 2.5 million years ago.

And so robotic research is fascinating

as a laboratory for exploring what remarkable creatures

we human beings are.

- A lot of people think of Honda as just

an automobile or a motorcycle company,

and they really are surprised to learn that there's

this research program in robotics,

and that Honda has developed a robot, Asimo.

The goal is to eventually have a bipedal,

humanoid robot that can be helpful

in a person's home.

- People sometimes ask,

well, why would Honda go into bipedal mobility?

And I think the answer is in the word mobility itself.

Honda's always been a mobility company.

The whole development started in 1986,

and at that time, the general thinking,

even among specialists, was that it would be impossible

to develop a bipedal robot.

- Attempting to replicate human motion

is a remarkably challenging task.

It's much more complex than we would ever imagine

when we look at the idea of

just stepping one foot in front of the other.

In many ways, the robot walks like a toddler,

back and forth very carefully,

slowly, and as the robot matures,

hopefully we'll see the smoothing out of the movement.

- The mobility of Asimo has come so far,

and all the research that went into Asimo

is really bringing about some phenomenal technology

I think that can be applied

at other parts of Honda's business.

- One of the reasons why we have one of the most fantastic

anti-lock brake system in the world

comes from the endeavor of building a robot

that can walk up stairs.

- This 20-some years of studying how to walk

has provided Honda with great insight

into how to help people who are

perhaps having difficulty walking

with the walking assist device.

- As you could see, walking is not a trivial motor action.

It is in fact, a very complex and daunting task,

especially if you wish to replicate it in robots.

But what are the main characteristics

of the lifespan perspective?

The lifespan perspective of motor development

is a process that is lifelong,

age-related but not age-determined,

sequential, continuous or cumulative,

individual and multicausal.

But how long does it take for motor capability to develop?

That is a tricky question, because your motor repertoire

change as a function of your cumulative experience

as a mover in the world that you live in.

In the study of motor development,

age is often a good variable

for keeping track of developmental change,

but is not a causal factor in development.

In other words, we say that development is age related,

but not age-determined.

As age advance, development proceeds.

However, development can be faster or slower

at different times, and rates of development

can differ among individuals of the same age.

Age can be interpreted in several ways,

not only chronologically.

Think about how old are you.

If you take into account that time elapsed

since your conception,

you'd have what we call post-conceptional age.

If by any chance, you were born prematurely,

your chronological age would be corrected

by stating from the due date and not from your birth date.

This image depicts this age on a timeline.

Gestational age is considered to be the time

elapsed from conception to birth.

Chronological age is the most commonly used by us

to define our current age,

which is the time elapsed since our birth.

Post-conceptional age is the sum

of the gestational age and chronological age.

Finally the corrected age is the time elapsed

from the due date with some times, in case of preemies,

does not coincide with the chronological age.

We can also consider biological and developmental age.

For example, biological can be morphological, skeletal,

dental, and sexual age.

Developmental age are very specific,

and it's measured relative to the onset

of specific motor milestones.

For example, the time elapsed from your first

independent steps will define your walking age.

The main point that I wanna make here is,

with so many ways to measure age,

we cannot solely use chronological time

to explain motor development.

Development is also considered to be sequential

and continuous.

Sequential means that development

involves sequential change.

One step leads to the next step

in an orderly and irreversible fashion.

This change results from interactions

from both within the individual,

and between the individual and the environment.

Continuous is a process of progressively changing

our functional capability.

Now that we have learned conceptual factors

in motor development,

let's define some of the basic terms

that will help us to have common understanding

of motor development.

The first difference that I want to explore are

the nuances of motor development, learning, and control.

The term motor development used to refer

the development of movement abilities.

Those who studied motor development

explored developmental change in movements,

as well as the factors underlying those changes.

Motor learning refers to movement changes

that are relatively permanent,

but are related to experience or practices

that happen at certain period of life,

rather than during the individual's lifelong process.

Combining both of them, development and learning,

motor control refers to the nervous system's

control of the muscles to permit

skilled and coordinated movements.

In recent years, researchers in motor development

and motor control have found so much in common.

Understanding how the nervous system and movement abilities

change with age expands our knowledge of motor control.

In fact, we want to understand how we achieve

certain levels of movement control,

and this is how motor control develops.

The other three terms that we have to define

and differentiate are growth, maturation, aging.

Growth, which is a process of an individual organism

growing organically.

It is a quantitative increase in size or magnitude.

A purely biological unfolding of events

involved in an organism changing.

A good example would be height, weight,

or even changes in the size of tissues

after a physical growth period.

Maturation connotes progress towards physical maturity.

The state of optimal functional integration

of individual's body systems,

and the human ability to reproduce.

However, remember that development continues

long after physical maturity is reached.

As you can see, development includes

independent growth and maturation.

However, you cannot make a confusion

think that development and maturation are synonymous.

They are not.

Finally, the term aging can be used in a broad sense

to refer to the progress of growing older,

regardless of chronological age.

It can also refer specifically to changes that lead to

a loss of adaptability, or function.

Well, we hope you have enjoyed this session,

and that by now, you know what is motor development,

and what are the main characteristics

of a developmental perspective.

Thanks for watching.

(bright music)

For more infomation >> Fundamentals Concepts and Characteristics of Motor Development - Duration: 14:58.

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TIME NOW FOR

EYEWITNESS NEWS CALL

12 FOR ACTION...

A NEW STUDY SHOWS A

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EXPLAIN ----THE SURGING

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(HE)

THE REPORT RANKS

DRIVING SAFETY LAWS

NATIONWIDE.

RHODE ISLAND TOPS THE

LIST.

EYEWITNESS NEWS

CONSUMER REPORTER

SUSAN CAMPBELL JOINS

US NOW WITH THE

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EVEN THOUGH RHODE

ISLAND TOPS THE LIST -

THE REPORT SAYS THERE

ARE A COUPLE LAWS THAT

WOULD MAKE RHODE

ISLAND ROADS SAFER -

INCLUDING AN ALL-RIDER

MOTORCYLE HELMET LAW.

FOR JAMES SHAFFER -

THERE'S ONE MOMENT - THAT

WILL FOREVER BE SEARED INTO

HIS MEMORY...

"...sitting him down and having

to

explain to him that his mother

and

sister were gone and had died

was

probably the hardest thing i've

ever

had to do in my life."

SHAFFER'S WIFE EMMA - AND

THEIR 12 YEAR OLD DAUGHTER

WERE HIT HEAD ON BY A

WOMAN WHO POLICE BELIEVE

WAS TEXTING... THE DRIVER

AND HER YOUNG DAUGHTER

ALSO DIED IN THE CRASH.

"our lives have been drastically

changed and shattered."

A REPORT RELEASED TODAY BY

'ADVOCATES FOR HIGHWAY AND

AUTO SAFETY' SHOWS A 7.2

PERCENT SPIKE IN MOTOR

VEHICLE CRASH FATALITIES IN

2015.

THE REPORT ALSO RANKS

STATES BASED ON THEIR

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MASSACHUSETTS IS IN THE

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OF 15.

THE REPORT CLAIMS - ACROSS

THE COUNTRY - STATES ARE

MISSING 376 IMPORTANT

TRAFFIC SAFETY LAWS.

ACCORDING TO THE NATIONAL

HIGHWAY TRANSPORTATION

ADMINISTRATION - THERE WERE

45 FATALITIES IN RHODE ISLAND

IN 2015.. THE SAME YEAR - 306

FATALITIES IN MASSACHUSETTS.

(SC)

A SPOKESPERSON FOR

THE RHODE ISLAND DOT

TELLS ME THIS REPORT IS

ENCOURAGING..

BUT HE SAYS THERE'S A

LOT MORE WORK TO DO -

TO REDUCE TRAFFIC

DEATHS.

HE SAYS ALMOST HALF OF

THE TRAFFIC DEATHS IN

RHODE ISLAND IN 2015

INVOLVED AN IMPAIRED

DRIVER.

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For more infomation >> Study Shows Spike in Fatal Motor Vehicle Accidents - Duration: 2:23.

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Constraints: A Theoretical Model to Understand Motor Development - Duration: 6:59.

(beaming music)

(soft upbeat music)

- Across lifespan, your body, your mind, your emotions,

and your relationships change and effect each other.

There is no single cause of development change

and many factors are important.

As a developmentalist, you may be interested in for example

not only in the observational changes that happen in patterns,

but also in understanding why some behaviors develop

in a certain way.

Karl Newell, a professor from Penn State University,

suggested that in 1986, that movements develop from

the interactions between organism, the environment

in which the movement occurs,

and the tasks to be undertaken.

Because we are mainly concerned with human movements,

in this course, we are not going to use the term

organism, instead we are going to use the term individual.

According to Newell, if any of these three factors change,

the resultant movement changes.

He called these three factors constraints.

A constraint is a characteristic of

individual,

environment,

and task.

Combining all these constraints together

and the interactions among them is how we define

how a particular motor action is performed.

Constraints do not have only a negative or bad impact

in human movement performance.

At the same time that an existing constraint acts as a

restrictive or limiting factor in a motor action,

it also provides channels for which the movements

most easily emerge.

For example, high heels can limit the way you walk around,

but at the same time allows for a different posture control.

Why not see a more sophisticated way to walk?

If you think of an individual with a disability for example,

the disability can eventually constrain the action,

but does not always prevent the individual's ability

to function during his daily life activities

or even during exercise.

Let's explore these three different types of constraints

presented by Newell in his model.

The individual, according to him,

are constraints that are related

to a person's characteristics.

They can either be structural or functional.

Structural constraints are related to the body's physical

structure and tend to change slowly across the lifespan.

Height, weight, and muscle mass are great examples

of structural constraints.

Functional constraints on the other hand,

are related to behavioral function.

For example, attentional focus, strength, motivation,

flexibility, and even fear can be examples

of functional constraints.

Task constraints, for example, include the goals of movement

in the specific constraints imposed.

For example, goals of the task, rules specifying

the movement dynamics and implementing some machines

used to perform movements.

If you think of someone playing basketball,

the goal is to get the ball in the hoop.

However, in order to achieve this goal, the player must

dribble while running with the ball.

The ball, in fact, is an implement that also constrains

the game dynamics.

Finally, we should consider the environmental constraints.

They are generally recognized as those external to

the individual's body.

Environmental constraints are property

of the world around us.

It can be physical for example.

A great example could be characteristics of the environment

such as temperature, light, humidity, gravity,

and surface of the floors.

But they also can be social culture.

For example, how a culture or a particular society

can determine practices in participation in sport

and physical activity.

The change in human's participation rate in sport

and activities in the last decade is a great example

of environment socio-cultural constraint.

Putting all these pieces together,

we should think that every single human action is a result

of all these constraints together.

We must always consider every potential relationship between

the characteristics of the individual mover,

the surroundings, and the reasons for his movement.

Why is Newell's model so helpful

in studying motor development?

It reflects the dynamic, constantly changing interactions

in motor development.

It allows us to look at the individual

in different ways and all the different body systems

that constantly undergo age-related changes.

At the same time, the model emphasizes the influence

of where the individual moves this is the environment.

And, what type of task the individual does.

In summary, think that change in the individual lead

to changes in is or her interaction

with the environment and tasks.

At the same time, tasks and the environment change

the way the individual moves.

(soft upbeat music)

For more infomation >> Constraints: A Theoretical Model to Understand Motor Development - Duration: 6:59.

-------------------------------------------

The Mountain of Motor Development: The Periods... - Duration: 18:59.

(chimes)

(ghostly music)

(uplifting music)

- Well let me start by saying

the periods that we identified on the mountain metaphor,

had actually been developed before

I came up with the mountain, as a metaphor.

So that's in the '94 paper, which is,

you know, a little dense, no pictures.

But it was an attempt to characterize

the behavior of the developing infant

and child and later, adult, rather than

in the old and traditional way.

So if you look at all the ways in which other people have

created periods, they have never started with that first

period of life, which is the first two weeks, approximately.

Remember these are only estimates, these time periods.

But at birth, what characterizes the baby's behavior?

And most people just say,

"Oh this is when they do all the things."

Well, not the first two weeks.

The trauma of coming through the birth canal

is so extreme for the baby

that they need...

Mother nature needs to provide them with things to survive

in their movement.

And so they have two things

that they already had in the womb.

They had reflexes and they had spontaneous movements.

These are behaviors that were in the womb

and now you come out of a micro-gravitational world

into a gravitational world.

That means all of the sudden your limbs are a lot heavier

than they were when you were a baby.

You were a fetus.

So, the neonate, when they come out, is like,

"Wow, woah, what's this?"

So you can't just assume that they'll be able to move

"typically," as it were.

So they'll have these reflexes

that will ensure their survival,

and that's what Mother Nature's done

with the reflexive period.

That doesn't last very long,

and then everybody else just says

you go through these sort of...

I don't know.

Almost phylogenetic skills that babies...

They sit, they roll over, they stand, they walk,

and so on.

But again, I'll go back to Jerome Bruner

who had this idea, the idea of the mountain, as well.

He once wrote a paper on "Preadapted Behaviors."

And preadapted is this idea that,

if you come into the world with, sort of a tendency,

or a sort of favoritism towards certain kinds of behaviors

that'll make it easier if you come into

certain environments.

So if we were, I aways say, if we were born on the moon

we wouldn't crawl, you know.

But we would have always had the preadaptation

to do those kinds of patterns.

So, when we come into the world, you see,

the precursors of our walking right at the very beginning.

We have the walking reflex, okay,

but it's a preadapted behavior.

We have the spontaneous behaviors of flexion and extension.

And these behaviors really prime the system

and then in the context of the floor,

your playpen, your crib, your parent's lap.

You begin to explore all these kinds of

patterns that are within the system.

Some people have actually called them

"coordinative structures."

There's an old paper in 1972 by Easton who says

"These are all in the system as 'coordinative structures.'"

Well the system's certainly, the neuromuscular system,

has these tendencies to do like flexion, extension patterns

in certain ways, and also together.

So, when I move my arms like this,

that's not a real surprise, it not like I

just created that, but rather these patterns

were in my nervous system from the start.

So I picked up this,

again being very influenced by Jerome Bruner,

picked up this idea that these are not just

you know, the first year behaviors of babies,

but really they're preadaptations to our behaviors

that we will then use.

From there, then, where do we go?

I mean, we're on our way to going up the mountain

to becoming very skillful.

So how we come into the world with these predisposed or

preadapted behaviors...

What does it mean to be... go next.

Well, okay, so lets just think about it.

We have this multi-segmented body.

Every place I have a joint, I can deform.

Okay, so, if I put my hands down to support my body weight

or I put my legs down to support my body weight,

every time I have a joint, that joint could collapse.

Okay, and when it collapses, then I could deform, okay?

So, the problem for the developing child

in their motor skills is to figure out how to

manage these joints, okay?

So, let's just take the hip and the knee and the ankle,

the easiest ones.

So, what do babies do when you hold them up on your lap

when they're in the preadapted period?

And you've got them in your lap and they're bouncing.

And they like to bounce.

They kind of give and they go.

And they give and they extend.

So, they have flexion extension of the joints,

flexion extension of the joints.

And you play with them and you toss them back and forth

and you know, they laugh with glee and so on.

And later they'll go along the couch

and they'll do the same thing themselves.

So, when they're nine or 10 months old they might stand and

do this kind of cruising action,

you know and they might do this bouncing.

"Babies dancing" we sometimes call it,

but the idea is that the

system is working out these patterns of coordination.

Coordination. Co-ordination.

That is the ordering or co-ordering of these behaviors,

that is of the segments.

So, alright, that's fine we get to the end of the first year

and we say "okay."

But the end of the preadaptive period, we're ready to go.

We have the two things we need in life: walking, well,

being able to eat — That's hand-eye coordination —

get the food in front of you, get it in your mouth.

Now it's messy, you know, babies do this

and they get it all over their face,

that's why we have bibs for them, you know.

But they can reach out, pick up their Cheerio

and put it in their mouth.

They can reach out and

play with their spoon,

they're not using their spoon at one year.

But, they can do self-feeding

and that is, think about it, farther on down the mountain,

or up the mountain, you have this hand-eye coordination now

becomes the hand-eye coordination for ball skills, okay?

Now balls are moving, but, hopefully your food isn't moving

but when you're eating, you have to be able to reach out

and get what you want and bring it to your mouth, alright?

So, you have, at the end of the... right around

10 or 11 months of age, babies are able to do

independent self feeding.

But the other part is you have to get to your food.

So, now you have to have locomotion.

At that point,

you have all of the motor skills to survive, pretty much.

You have the foundation of what you need.

You need to transport yourself someplace

and you need to be able to eat.

But of course, as human beings, as animals in the

animal kingdom, we have to actually go get food.

We have to prepare food.

We have to grow food.

We have to kill food,

if we're, you know,

doing hunters and gatherers kind of things.

So, the human beings, like animals,

have the need to have these other skills,

not just being able to get up and walk from here to there,

or being able to feed themselves;

they have to be able to a whole array

of culturally determined behaviors to survive, okay?

Let's not think sports skills right now,

or the technical skills of typing or handwriting,

but just think about the skills you need to survive.

So, as a human, you have to...

We have these early motor behaviors in place.

Now, for the next,

six or seven or maybe even, you know, much longer than that,

you'll then have to work out

the gross motor patterns of coordination.

These are what we sometimes call the fundamental patterns

of coordination.

Motor development is always going on, you know,

from, even if you can't get these to start with

or even if you do get them, could you stop though?

Well there's other goals of all...

To be an independent person

you need to have those two things.

You need to be able to feed yourself

and you need to be able to get where you want to go.

Is that enough yet?

For some people that would probably be just fine.

But, in our culture today, we generally have to have

some kind of manual skills.

We have to be able to dress ourself.

You need to be able to use a pen or a pencil

or a typewriter, something like that.

You have to be able to do other tool use.

Do you have to play baseball?

No, you know that baseball is not in every culture.

So, of course not, you know.

You don't have the sport games skills that we have

but we we have the fundamental skills for survival like

tool use, I would say, and

of course motor skills for climbing and walking,

and so on, and running.

So, fundamental motor skills are one of those

words we often used... use, but never really think about.

We don't take them apart and think, "What does it mean?"

So, if you're taking this class, a teacher says,

"What are the fundamental motor skills?"

and you write a list down.

(laughs)

But, what did it really mean?

Basically these are patterns

that will be seen across all cultures.

So, across every culture, all humans who are "typical"—

so I'm not talking about people who are born with

a disability—

will walk, they will run,

and they try to go faster and faster and faster,

the walking will turn into running.

They will trip, and so they will hop, okay?

So, you trip up your foot, you'll hop.

You'll try to catch up and you'll do a gallop.

A gallop being one long step and one short step.

Skipping is seen, you know, most people say,

"Oh, skipping. Doesn't everybody skip?"

Actually, one of my friends once called it the "happy gait"

and, in fact, most cultures will have

some form of skipping.

So, it's hop and a step on one foot

and a hop and a step on the other foot.

So, these are considered to be phylogenetic,

meaning all people of the human species will

do these behaviors

if, in fact, they are given enough opportunity

and they don't have a disability.

But, are they "fundamental?"

I've tended to think of them as

fundamental patterns of coordination. That is,

in order to get from here to there,

my legs can move in different ways.

They can do this 180 degree out a phase

or 50/50 phasing, which is walking and running,

or they can be asymmetric,

which would be like a gallop.

So, you have this sort of two-to-one, you know

one long step one short step,

and then you can kind of play around with them.

You can do jumping, you know.

You can do leaping.

You can do galloping, giddy-up giddy-up,

and then you can do skipping.

Those are playful gaits

or gaits that are used for certain kinds of

gross motor activities.

And the system, particularly a jump,

your motor system needs to figure out how to

maximize these or create these patterns of coordination.

I attempt to try to not call them

"fundamental skills" because they're not skillful,

they're tasks, but we call them a skill

because that means that... we characterize them that way.

Say like, well, handwriting is a motor skill

but you might not be skillful at it.

Throwing a ball is a motor skill,

but it isn't something that

necessarily says you are skillful.

And the fundamental motor patterns,

sometimes called the fundamental motor skills,

are these building blocks for later behaviors

that you need to work out deformable body.

Remember, my trunk and my arms and my head

all have to sort of keep balanced over my moving legs.

And that all have to be "co-ordinated"

so I don't just fall over every time I try that.

It's not a simple task

because what we're going to do is

we're going to take our fundamental patterns of coordination

and we're going to parameterize them

or use them in different contexts to make them better

so that they're, if we use the word "skillful,"

which is, they are efficient by mechanically

psychologically and physiologically efficient.

So, that's what everyone does.

On the way to becoming skillful,

it doesn't have to be tennis,

it doesn't have to be swimming,

or gymnastics, or dance, it can be anything.

So, speaking, which is a hugely

complex motor skill to learn,

and that children go through as well,

and handwriting.

These are all important skills that everyone has.

So, why not do those?

So then as I did that I thought,

"Well this doesn't make any sense to call this

a sport specific skill,"

let's call it the "context specific,"

that is, it's specific to certain contexts.

And that's a long period also

but one of the things that got lost in this is

that people just sort of put it in a certain place.

"Context specific" also means there's changes

in cognitive development.

You can't become a good tennis player

or a good basketball player

until you understand the strategies and the rules.

A five year old child doesn't understand

the strategies or rules of a sport yet.

Well, I suppose you could really work on that

but generally they don't have the cognitive development

to get these kinds of ideas.

And that's one of the other things that I think is inherent

in the concept of motor development that I have

which is that, it's not just all the motor system,

but it's a perceptual system, the cognitive system

and the social environment in which you are developing.

So, the culture is so important.

But every culture has its culturally promoted behaviors,

and they might be dancing, in some cultures,

they might be singing, in some cultures,

they might be, you know,

fútbol or soccer as we would call it here,

or it could be, you know, swimming or anything like that.

The point is, that as we move from the

fundamental patterns of coordination

we now take these fundamental patterns,

collect them up and put them together into

more complex motor skills

and use them in certain contexts.

So, now it's not just running,

it's running in a certain way, okay?

It's not just throwing

but it's throwing to a specific target at a certain time.

So, this cognitive development is so important

and that context-specific period is where the child's

sort of cognition or their thinking skills

become part of their motor skill

repertoire as they learn certain contexts.

And then of course, you go only,

most of us, you know, start on this continuum

of a skillful period.

Skillful though, is on a continuum from

good, skillful, enough,

to an expert, alright, or Olympian-like.

So, remember, the skillful period is this very long period

of becoming better and better at something

and of course, we don't all become good at everything,

obviously, but if I said to you,

"Sign your name," you could do that without even thinking.

The "Skillful period" is sort of this long

continuous period where,

maybe you get to the top of the mountain

and you become an Olympic player

and maybe you're a very skillful speaker,

very skillful writer, or a typist,

or a piano player.

But, even the piano playing, you could be very good

every Christmas you could play all the

Christmas songs for everyone, but are you good enough

to actually go to Carnegie Hall and play,

you know, no, of course not.

And then there's the last stage.

Okay, so get to the top of the mountain

and you can say, why, you know,

"Why is the last stage called compensation?"

But the point was that all of a sudden I realized

that skillful was on a continuum in which

it isn't just about aging,

it isn't about getting old

and your motor skills go downhill,

but rather you compensate many times in your life

as your skillfulness comes down

and you compensate for the change in something in your body

and your individual capabilities.

And, yes, a lot of those are associated with aging

but they don't have to be.

So a person, even when they age

or they have a serious injury,

they can recover from that and then they can compensate.

There are many old people who compensate for

their slowness but are very clever at playing.

By just dropping the ball just there and throwing,

you know, the ball just where you're not,

because they're using their head rather than their body.

So, all you need to know is, I mean,

I play golf, and there are many old people, very old people

who can still beat me at golf

because they've just learned to compensate

for their lack of big power and their long hits

and are now cleverer in other ways of the game.

So, the "compensation period," I just refuse to call it the

"old age period" or anything like that

because I think it happens at any time

when you have skill

and you have to compensate for that skill.

And yes, it of course

happens more at the end of the continuum,

but it's happened to you I'm sure.

(uplifting music)

(whooshing noises)

(whooshing noises)