Walking through history: Changing constraints in developmental thinking

Abstract

The ‘1984 Walking’ article of Thelen et al. appeared in a time period characterized by dramatic changes in theoretical perspectives with respect to motor control. The 1960s and 1970s were the heydays of the information-processing approach with many concepts from this theoretical perspective finding their way into the fields of motor control and motor development. In the earlier eighties, ecological psychology, coordinative structure theory and dynamic systems theory were introduced (Gibson, 1987; Kelso, 1995; Kugler, Kelso, & Turvey, 1982). The research described in the article of Thelen et al. can be considered as one of the first experimental studies to test the theoretical concepts provided by these new avenues of theoretical thinking. This paper presented a new way of thinking guided by new and different constraints. Twenty years later, studies of motor development have become a major testing ground for examining the developmental implications of these new theoretical perspectives. Applying the central concepts of these perspectives to the study of infancy, with its rapid changes in perception, action and cognition, have lead to a deepened understanding of motor development. In turn, the study of infancy has served to further refine many of these concepts. This mutuality is to a large extent responsible for today’s major interest in motor development and, more particularly, in the development of motor coordination. The experiments conducted by Thelen in the early 1980s, among them those reported in the Infant Behavior and Development