Motor Development: Embodied, Embedded, Enculturated, and Enabling

                                                        Photo by Lubomirkin on Unsplash

🚀 Article in 3 Sentences

1. The paper begins by explaining why motor development and psychology are intertwined.
2. Embodied & Embedded: No movement will ever be able to be repeated in the same way as the bodies, environment and task are in continual flux. Movements only occur in a body that is in a physical environment. Changes to either of these alter the possibilities for action
3. Encultured & Enabling: Motor skills are constrained by sociocultural constraints. The acquisition of new skills open up more of the world which enable more opportunities for exploration and learning.

🤝Impressions

This is one of my all time favourite papers and really enjoyed going over it again.

👨‍🏫Who should read this?

Anybody that is involved in coaching or teaching could benefit from reading the paper. While it’s about infants the same aspects of development span across all motor development

🎾How Article will influence my coaching

• Need to be more aware of what the current action capabilities of the players are and what they can/can’t do because of this. What affordances are unavailable to them due to their action capabilities?
• What are the sociocultural constraints present and what one’s are benefiting and what are having a negative influence
• They are learning to generate relevant info about novel problems and their potential solutions

📃Takeaways for coaches

• Movements are constrained by the capabilities of the performer, situated in an affordance rich environment, and shaped by the sociocultural constraints. Increased action capabilities create new possibilities for action which can instigate developmental cascades in unrelated areas.
• Behavioural flexibility is the ability to adapt actions to suit changes in the body, environment and task. Flexibility can involve transferring a solution from another area or coming up with a new one to suit the demands of the situation
• Learning to move requires learning to adapt behaviour to the status of the body at every moment
• All infants (every person) must solve the problem of moving their own unique body they have
• As skill develops new aspects of the environment become available to explore and exploit
• Affordances are always present. It’s whether or not the individual notices them or has the action capabilities to exploit them
• Social and cultural influences (sociocultural constraints) shape motor development but are often ignored
• “In learning to learn, rather than learning cue-consequence associations , facts, or particular solutions for familiar problems , infants acquire the ability to generate relevant information about novel locomotor problems and their potential solutions. Each problem space has its own set of information-generating behaviors and its own learning curve”(Adolph 2008)
• New skills provide more opportunities for actions which means that they will have to adapt their behaviour to be able to use these skills
• Once they start walking the infants explore much further which allows them to see, do and play more

🥇Top Quotes

💡 In less alliterative terms, movements are constrained by the current status of the body, situated in an environment that offers myriad possibilities for action, and shaped by social influences and culturally specific child-rearing practices. Moreover, new motor skills create new opportunities for learning and can instigate cascades of developments far afield from the original accomplishment.

💡 However extreme, all bodies differ, and all infants must solve the problem of moving in the particular body that they have (Adolph & Robinson 2015, Blumberg & Dooley 2017). 

 💡 The continual flux of a variable and developing environment prevents infants from learning fixed movement patterns and promotes behavioral flexibility (Adolph & Robinson 2015).

💡 Put a different way, infants do not really learn to move. Instead, to borrow Harlow’s (1949) notion, they are learning to learn to move. Infants learn to perceive affordances at each moment, with their current body and skills in the current environment and for the current task. 

💡 Moreover, they suggested that motor development both promotes and demands improvements in behavioral flexibility because new motor skills provide new opportunities for action but also require new solutions. 

📖Here's a link to the full paper

Adolph & Hoch (2019): Motor Development: Embodied, Embedded, Enculturated and Enabling

✍These are my detailed notes on the paper if you'd like to take a deeper dive into the paper

Research Notes- Adolph & Hoch: Motor Development (2019)