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This book is divided into sections. Each section is devoted to a particular issue in Motor Development and comprises two or more contributions. The order of presentation mirrors the order of presentation at the Institute and thus is not entirely fortuitous! Nevertheless, it does not reflect any value judgement on the part of the editors as to the importance of anyone issue in comparison to others addressed in the book. This volume is to be seen as a companion volume to 'Themes in Moto!' Development' in which the more specific topics presented during the Institute are published. Together, the two volumes provide both a general and theme specific approach to this expanding field of knowledge. XI PREFACE Books and conferences, on what in North America is euphemistically termed motor development, have been few and far between in the past 25 years. This is not to say that the study of how children acquire and develop motor skills has not been a subject on which scientists have focused their attention. In the United States in the 1930's and 1940's, Bayley (1935) and Gesell and Amatruda (1947) described and scaled the rates at which young children acquired motor skills. In Europe, the development of childrens' motor behaviour was of theoretical interest to Piaget (1952).
List of contents
Section 1 Motor Skill Acquisition in Children: Perspectives and Problems.- A Perspective on Motor Development.- Some Problems in Explaining the Origins of Movement Control.- A Knowledge-Based Approach to Motor Skill Acquisition.- Section 2 Prenatal Onset of Motor Patterns.- Prenatal Motor Development.- The Maturation and Development of Fetal Motor Patterns.- Section 3 Development of Coordination.- Development of Coordinated Movement: Dynamic, Relational and Multileveled Perspectives.- Development of Coordinated Movement: Implications for Early Human Development.- Issues in the Study of Human Motor Skill Development: A Reaction to John Fentress.- Section 4 Perception and Action.- Perception and Representation in the Guidance of Spatially Coordinated Behaviour.- Movement Invariances in Culture Specific Skills.- The Emergence of Manual Skills.- Perception-Action Coupling in the Young Infant.- The Perception-Action Perspective: A Commentary on von Hofsten.- Section 5 The Development of Intersubjectivity.- Development of Intersubjective Motor Control in Infants.- Subjective Comments on the Development of Intersubjectivity.- Section 6 Establishing a Base for Perception and Action.- Establishing a Frame of Reference for Action.- Contribution of Head-Movement to the Accuracy of Directional Aiming and Coincidence-Timing Tasks.- Visuo-Manual Coordination from 6 to 10: Specification, Control and Evaluation of Direction and Amplitude Parameters of Movement.- Section 7 Cognition and Action.- Constraints on the Development of Coordination.- Motor Coordination: Constraints and Cognition a Reaction to K.M. Newell.- Action and Cognition Cognitive and Motor Skills in a Developmental Perspective.- Relating Cognition and Action: Reaction to Mounoud.- Cognition and Action: A Reply to Mounoud.- Section 8 Contribution of the Neurosciences to an Understanding of Motor Development.- Development and Acquisition of Motor Skills: A Challenging Prospect for Neuroscience.- The Contribution of the Neurosciences to Understanding the Development of Reaching.- Section 9 Epilogue.- A Morphological Perspective on the Origin and Evolution of Movement Patterns.
