What the Dynamic Systems Approach Can Offer for Understanding Development: An Example of Mid-childhood Reaching

Abstract

The Dynamic Systems Approach (DSA) to development has been shown to be a promising theory to understand developmental changes. In this perspective, we use the example of mid-childhood (6- to 10-years of age) reaching to show how using the DSA can advance the understanding of development. Mid-childhood is an important developmental period that has often been overshadowed by the focus on the acquisition of reaching during infancy. This underrepresentation of mid-childhood studies is unjustified, as earlier studies showed that important developmental changes in mid-childhood reaching occur that refine the skill of reaching. We review these studies here for the first time and show that different studies revealed different developmental trends, such as non-monotonic and linear trends, for variables such as movement time and accuracy at target. Unfortunately, proposed explanations for these developmental changes have been tailored to individual studies, limiting their scope. Also, explanations were focused on a single component or process in the system that supposedly causes developmental changes. Here, we propose that the DSA can offer an overarching explanation for developmental changes in this research field. According to the DSA, motor behavior emerges from interactions of multiple components entailed by the person, environment, and task. Changes in all these components can potentially contribute to the emerging behavior. We show how the principles of change of the DSA can be used as an overarching framework by applying these principles not only to development, but also the behavior itself. This underlines its applicability to other fields of development.

Health Anxiety Predicts the Perceived Dangerousness of COVID-19 over and above Intrusive Illness-Related Thoughts, Contamination Symptoms, and State and Trait Negative Affect

“…Another limitation is that, in the current study, a large portion of variance in the perceived dangerousness of COVID-19 remains unexplained, thereby requiring more research about the factors associated with COVID-19-related perceptions. Future studies using a longitudinal design could consider the System Dynamics approach as a means to model the various influences on perceptions of COVID-19 as dangerous [ 63 , 64 ]. In addition, the use of an Italian sample may limit generalizability to other countries, as results may not be identical for individuals with different backgrounds and pandemic-related stressors or in countries with different government responses.…”

Development of reaching during mid-childhood from a Developmental Systems perspective

“…That is why examining changes in performance over age was considered sufficient to understand developmental changes. Even though these studies and approaches have gathered important knowledge about mid-childhood development, we propose that if one wants to understand the full range and complexity of developmental changes, one should depart from studying just one level and should distinguish the development of individual levels contributing to reaching (see for detail criticism of earlier studies Golenia et al [ 14 ]).…”

“…From this perspective a great deal of understanding about the acquisition of reaching skills during early-infancy has been achieved [ 19 – 23 ]. Here, we noted the lack of using ideas from the DS perspective on the study of reaching development during mid-childhood [ 14 ]. Following the DS perspective, understanding developmental trends requires examining not only variables at the performance level, but also variables at other levels and their relation.…”

A Review on Dynamic Systems Theory and the Children’s Motor Development

“…Children are developing both gross and fine motor skills at this stage to practice basic skills such as drawing, coloring and writing with hands-on experiences in living skills. They typically enter early childhood education centre such as nursery and kindergarten or preschool where all activities that they play at school could be trained in order to enhance their eye hand coordination and develop their motor skills (Golenia, et. al.…”

“…The DST offers therecent way of developing a thought that differed from the conventional perspective to understanding the motor development of children. This approachconsiders motor activity as does not rely solely on the central nervous system where it elevated from self-organized subsystems to generate movement patterns (Golenia, et. al.…”