David C. Witherington

Travel broadens the mind.

The onset of locomotion heralds one of the major life transitions in early development and involves a pervasive set of changes in perception, spatial cognition, and social and emotional development. Through a synthesis of published and hitherto unpublished findings, gathered from a number of converging research designs and methods, this article provides a comprehensive review and reanalysis of the consequences of self-produced locomotor experience. Specifically, we focus on the role of locomotor experience in changes in social and emotional development, referential gestural communication, wariness of heights, the perception of self-motion, distance perception, spatial search, and spatial coding strategies. Our analysis reveals new insights into the specific processes by which locomotor experience brings about psychological changes. We elaborate these processes and provide new predictions about previously unsuspected links between locomotor experience and psychological function. The research we describe is relevant to our broad understanding of the developmental process, particularly as it pertains to developmental transitions. Although acknowledging the role of genetically mediated developmental changes, our viewpoint is a transactional one in which a single acquisition, in this case the onset of locomotion, sets in motion a family of experiences and processes that in turn mobilize both broad-based and context-specific psychological reorganizations. We conclude that, in infancy, the onset of locomotor experience brings about widespread consequences, and after infancy, can be responsible for an enduring role in development by maintaining and updating existing skills.

The Dynamic Systems Approach as Metatheory for Developmental Psychology

The dynamic systems perspective has been touted as an integrative metatheoretical framework for the study of stability and change in development. However, two dynamic systems camps exist with respect to the role higher-order form, once emergent, plays in the process of development. This paper evaluates these two camps in terms of the overarching world views they embody. Some dynamic systems proponents ground their conceptualization of development in pure contextualist terms by privileging the here-and-now in the explanation of development, whereas other proponents adopt an integration of organismic and contextualist world views by considering both local context and higher-order form in their explanatory accounts. These different ontological premises affect how each camp views the process of self-organization, the principle of circular causality and the very nature of explanation in developmental science.

Taking Emergence Seriously: The Centrality of Circular Causality for Dynamic Systems Approaches to Development

The dynamic systems (DS) approach has emerged as an influential and potentially unifying metatheory for developmental science. Its central platform – the argument against design – suggests that structure spontaneously and without prescription emerges through self-organization. In one of the most prominent accounts of DS, Thelen and her colleagues [Spencer, Dineva, & Schöner, 2009a; Thelen & Smith, 1994, 2006] have extended the argument against design to a complete ontological rejection of structural explanation. I argue that this antistructuralist stance conceptually undermines the very principle of emergence through self-organization upon which the approach is built, jeopardizing its process focus. Taking emergence seriously entails a strong commitment to circular causality and the reciprocal nature of structure-function relations through the adoption of a pluralistic model of causality, one that recognizes both local-to-global processes of construction and global-to-local processes of constraint.

Locomotor Experience Affects Self and Emotion

Two studies investigated the role of locomotor experience on visual proprioception in 8-month-old infants. Visual proprioception refers to the sense of self-motion induced in a static person by patterns of optic flow. A moving room apparatus permitted displacement of an entire enclosure (except for the floor) or the side walls and ceiling. In Study 1, creeping infants and prelocomotor/walker infants showed significantly greater postural compensation and emotional responses to side wall movement than did same-age prelocomotor infants. Study 2 used true random assignment of prelocomotor infants to locomotor-training (via a powered-mobility device) and no-training conditions. Experimental infants showed powerful effects of locomotor training. These results imply that locomotor experience is playing a causal role in the ontogeny of visual proprioception.

The role of locomotion in psychological development

The psychological revolution that follows the onset of independent locomotion in the latter half of the infants first year provides one of the best illustrations of the intimate connection between action and psychological processes. In this paper, we document some of the dramatic changes in perception-action coupling, spatial cognition, memory, and social and emotional development that follow the acquisition of independent locomotion. We highlight the range of converging research operations that have been used to examine the relation between locomotor experience and psychological development, and we describe recent attempts to uncover the processes that underlie this relation. Finally, we address three important questions about the relation that have received scant attention in the research literature. These questions include: (1) What changes in the brain occur when infants acquire experience with locomotion? (2) What role does locomotion play in the maintenance of psychological function? (3) What implications do motor disabilities have for psychological development? Seeking the answers to these questions can provide rich insights into the relation between action and psychological processes and the general processes that underlie human development.

The Development of Anticipatory Postural Adjustments in Infancy

Efficient voluntary action requires postural adjustments that compensate for potential balance disturbances before they occur. These anticipatory postural adjustments have been widely investigated in adults, but relatively little is known about their development, especially during infancy. This study examined the early development of anticipatory postural activity in support of pulling action while standing. A total of 34 infants between 10 and 17 months were tested. The task required infants to open a cabinet drawer to retrieve toys while a force resisting the pulling action was applied to the drawer. The experiment included between 9 and 13 pulling trials. The force resisting the pull was doubled after the first 4 initial trials and returned again to its original value after another 4 trials. Electromyographic activity from the gastrocnemius and biceps brachii muscles was recorded. The proportion of pulls involving anticipatory activity in the gastrocnemius muscles progressively increased between 10 and...

Self-Organization and Explanatory Pluralism: Avoiding the Snares of Reductionism in Developmental Science

Over the last 20 years, the concept of self-organization has played a central role in efforts to establish a relational metatheoretical approach to the study of development. Yet the notion of self-organization that predominates in scientific discussions today has undergone a conceptual narrowing relative to the broader use and interpretation of self-organization that characterized the biologically-oriented systems thinking of Weiss and von Bertalanffy and was grounded in Kants teleological account of organisms as natural ends or purposes. In this article, the author discusses how our conceptual use of self-organization in developmental science has changed under the influence of nonlinear dynamical systems theory and how these changes could actually foster rather than discourage new forms of reductionism in our thinking about development.

Emotional Action and Communication in Early Moral Development

Emotional action and communication are integral to the development of morality, here conceptualized as our concerns for the well-being of other people and the ability to act on those concerns. Focusing on the second year of life, this article suggests a number of ways in which young children’s emotions and caregivers’ emotional communication contribute to early forms of helping, empathy, and learning about prohibitions. We argue for distinguishing between moral issues and other normative issues also in the study of early moral development, for considering a wider range of emotional phenomena than the “moral emotions” most commonly studied, and for paying more attention to how specific characteristics of early emotional interactions facilitate children’s development of a concern for others.

Rediscovering Development in Infancy

This commentary endorses J. Kagans (2008) conclusion that many of the most dramatic findings on early perceptual, cognitive, and social competencies are ambiguous. It supports his call for converging research operations to disambiguate findings from single paradigms and single response indices. The commentary also argues that early competencies must be placed into a longitudinal framework, thereby allowing researchers to (a) identify whether regressive phenomena play a role in skill development, (b) understand what functions (if any) given skills play in their precocious manifestations and whether these functions are comparable in later instantiations of skills, and (c) avoid rich interpretations by identifying how robust a suspected competency is across contexts.

The Development of Affect Specificity in Infants' Use of Emotion Cues

This study examined the emergence of affect specificity in infancy. In this study, infants received verbal and facial signals of 2 different, negatively valenced emotions (fear and sadness) as well as neutral affect via a television monitor to determine if they could make qualitative distinctions among emotions of the same valence. Twenty 12- to 14-month-olds and 20 16- to 18-month-olds were examined. Results suggested that younger infants showed no evidence of referential specificity, as they responded similarly to both the target and distracter toys, and showed no evidence of affect specificity, showing no difference in play between affect conditions. Older infants, in contrast, showed evidence both of referential and affect specificity. With respect to affect specificity, 16- to 18-month-olds touched the target toy less in the fear condition than in the sad condition and showed a larger proportion of negative facial expressions in the sad condition versus the fear condition. These findings suggest a de...