MOTOR SKILLS WORK AS DYNAMIC SYSTEMS. FINE MOTOR DEVELOPMENT IS INFLUENCED BY THE INTERACTION OF SEVERAL FACTORS: CHILD’S PHYSICAL GROWTH, THE SURROUNDING ENVIRONMENT AND MOTOR EXPERIENCES

According to the dynamic systems theory of motor development, mastery of motor skills involves acquisition of increasingly complex systems of action to produce effective ways of exploring and controlling the environment.

It emphasises the ongoing interactions among the children (growth and behavioural characteristics), the environment (specific environmental circumstances) and the motor experience (development of specific movement). Complex and interconnected dynamical systems have many different components and are characterised by self-organisation.

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2. Malina, R. M. (2004). Motor development during infancy and early childhood: Overview and suggest directions for research. International Journal of Sport and Health Science, 2, 50-66.

Physical environment factors such as home or preschool environmental were associated with children’s motor development.

Researchers studied the main environmental factors that affect motor development and revealed that preschool centers are important considerations. This is because of the large amount of time children of working parents spend at preschool centres. Family features such as socioeconomic status (SES), mother’s educational level and siblings were found to impact motor development. The day-to-day interactions with people and the environment influence the brain’s physical structure and thus the functions the brain directs.

When the child is introduced to a variety of developmentally appropriate activities that will encourage the achievement of motor competency

, stronger connections between the two cerebral hemispheres and the cerebellum lead to better fine motor skills. These stronger connections guarantee learning and optimisation of brain functions, leading to more effective social interactions.

Social-cultural environment plays a part in the children’s motor development too. The social cultural context in which children are raised forms certain demands for their motor behaviour, favouring specific aspects of motor development and impairing others.

Researchers investigated differences in fine motor performance on the Bruininks-Oseretsky Test of Motor Proficiency (BOTMP), the most precise and comprehensive measure of gross and fine motor skills, between 6 to 10 year old children of Hong Kong and the United States.

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7. Chui, M. M. Y., Ng, A. M. Y., Fong, A. K. H., Lin, Lenzs S.Y., & Ng, M. W. F. (2007). Differences in the fine motor performance of children in Hong Kong and the United States on the Bruininks-Oseretsky test of motor proficiency. Hong Kong Journal of Occupational Therapy, 17(1), 1–9.

Findings revealed that the Hong Kong children performed significantly better in the subtests of Visual-Motor Control and Upper Limb Speed and Dexterity.

Another study also examined the psychometric properties of a fine motor assessment called the Hong Kong Preschool Fine-Motor Developmental Assessment (HK-PFMDA) with 0 to 5-year-old children in a Chinese population.

Both findings suggest that occupational therapists should be cautious of cross-cultural differences when assessing young children for early intervention.

Fine motor skills are defined as “small muscle movements requiring close eye-hand coordination”,

which stems from reaching and grasping in the first year of infancy. Before the reaching and grasping phase, pre-reaching takes place when newborns (usually from 0 to 3 months) make poorly coordinated swipes toward an object in front of them. This is due to the lack of muscular control and visual acuity which means the ability to see fine details. Visual acuity is limited in newborns and develops over the first year from 20/150 to 20/20 (the distance it takes a person with typical vision to read a letter 20 feet away).5 Hence, fine motor skills are achieved by the maturation of the central nervous system and specific motor experiences.

When infants start practising their fine motor skills, they develop small muscle control and coordination. The newborn’s grasp is replaced by the ulnar grasp, a clumsy motion which the fingers close against the palm.

The 3-month-old infants adjust their grasp to the size and shape of an object – a capacity that improves over the first year. At 3 to 4 months, they begin reaching for objects in front of them and gradually improve in accuracy.11 Infants’ vision improves when they are around 5 to 6 months, so they are able to reach for an object in a room that has been darkened by switching off the lights.

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1. Berk, L. E. (2017). Exploring lifespan development. Pearson.

In the next few months, infants become better at reaching with just one arm (rather than both) and reaching for moving objects. Once infants can reach, they modify their grasp. When infants begin to sit up at around 4 to 6 months, they coordinate both hands in exploring objects.

Exposing babies to motor activities involving manual dexterity helps in cognitive development. When babies control small muscles in their hands while performing simple tasks, they demonstrate the link between thought and action. Similarly, the sorts of grasps 6-month-old infants perform predict their ability to differentiate others’ grasps.

At 10 months, infants who are capable of pulling a cloth to retrieve a toy are more likely to understand the sequence of steps when they observe someone else performing the same goal-directed actions. This suggests that perception and execution of actions are connected. By end of their first year, infants use the thumb and index finger opposably in a well-coordinated pincer grasp and their ability to manipulate objects greatly expands. The 1-year-old toddler can pick up raisins, turn doorknobs and open and close small boxes.

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1. Berk, L. E. (2017). Exploring lifespan development. Pearson.

Providing infants opportunities for fine motor skills helps in their social development. Researchers found that infants could control their leg movements more easily than their hands.

By holding sounding toys alternately in front of infants’ hands and feet, researchers observed that infants showed interest in the object by reaching with their feet as early as 8 weeks of age until they engaged in well-coordinated reaching and grasping using their hands. Hand movement skills are considered an important factor in the development of social relationships.

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1. Berk, L. E. (2017). Exploring lifespan development. Pearson.

Infants’ observation of others’ reaching actions activates corresponding motor representations (naturalised mental representation of such actions) and develop their motor experience. In an experimental study, researchers found that 152 healthy and full-term pre-reaching infants viewed people as the casual agents who pursue goals and act efficiently to make things happen.

Using five experiments, they measured the infants’ visual attention to video recordings of people reaching for objects first on indirect paths constrained by the presence of a barrier, and then on either indirect or direct paths. Interestingly, when the person reached for and caused a change in the state of the object on contact, infants looked longer when this action was inefficient than when it was efficient. This indicates that even though babies are hindered by unrefined muscles in their arms and hands, with more practice, they will be able to grab and hold onto an object.

Infants learn about social behaviour through coordination of hands and eyes in goal-directed action. In an experimental study, researchers sampled

parent-infant dyads and found that the 1-year-olds rarely look to their parent’s face and eyes when engaging with objects. Instead, the infants and parents coordinate looking behaviour by attending to objects held by the self or the social partner. This pathway, through eye-hand coupling, leads to coordinated joint switches in visual attention and may be the dominant pathway through which physically active toddlers align their looking behaviour with a social partner. Findings, derived from the moment-to-moment tracking of eye gaze of 1-year-olds and their parents as they actively played with toys, suggest that there is an alternative pathway to the dynamic exchanges of parents’ and infants visual fixations in social interactions through coordination of hands and eyes in goal-directed action.

The correlation between manual dexterity and language competencies suggests the importance of giving children the opportunities for fine motor development. Manual dexterity is the ability to make coordinated hand and finger movements to grasp and manipulate objects. Researchers assessed manual dexterity using the pegboard task and examined relationships with verbal and nonverbal abilities in a diverse community sample of 63 children varying in language ability.

Results indicated that there were significant relationships between manual dexterity and performance on language competency (tests of non-word repetition, receptive vocabulary, receptive grammar, and nonverbal intelligence). Findings show that children with language and social communicative impairments often exhibit associated deficits in motor skills, which encompass fine and gross motor control. Hence, children with poor motor control should be screened for possible language difficulties, which can inform targets for intervention and remediation.

Level of manual dexterity could influence visual factors such as amblyopia, lazy eye. Amblyopia or lazy eye affects approximately three per cent of the population and is clinically defined as a two line or greater difference in visual acuity (VA) between the eyes in the presence of a predisposing amblyogenic condition, and in the absence of visible ocular or visual pathway disease.

In an investigation of the functional impact of amblyopia in children, the fine motor skills of amblyopes and age-matched control subjects were compared. The influence of visual factors that might predict any decrement in fine motor skills was also explored. Vision and fine motor skills were tested in a group of children with amblyopia of different causes, and age-matched control children. Findings conclude that motor skills were reduced in children with amblyopia. The deficits in motor performance were greatest on manual dexterity tasks requiring speed and accuracy.