The Child Study Center's 2005 Lois Bloom Lecture

EXPLAINING DEVELOPMENTAL TRANSITION IN INFANCY

Joseph J. Campos

University of California, Berkeley

 

            To a large extent, the history of behavioral science can be characterized as the study in a later historical epoch of the phenomena experimentally controlled for in the previous epoch. Recall nonsense syllables and the control of “meaning” in memory before the cognitive revolution; phenomenological analysis to break down organization of percepts into “true” sensory elements before Gestalt Psychology; the Skinner box and the constraint on behavioral flexibility in animal problem solving before the demise of behaviorism.

            Such “controlling out” has been the case for the role of motoric processes in the psychological development of the child. Our preferred methods of investigating infants—habituation, preferential looking, surprise paradigms—have been praised and widely adopted precisely because they control out as much as possible the confounding variable of motoric processes. Our field has granted to the motoric domain at best a secondary role—that of providing crude milestones for clinicians to assess how age-appropriate the infant’s development is. Such clinical usage notwithstanding, on the whole, motor development has been a nuisance variable to get rid of in experimentation, and a developmental dead-end in itself.

            This misconstrual and neglect of motor factors in development has been an enormous mistake—an error comparable in scope to the exclusion of meaning, perceptual organization, and behavioral flexibility alluded to previously. This presentation will briefly review how motoric processes are critical components of many aspects of the psychological development of the infant. They lead, in both a literal and metaphorical sense, to “step functions” in development, and can “pace” psychological growth. Far from being dead developmental ends, the motoric may be crucial life-long scaffolds for cognition and emotion, scaffolds lost at the cost of loss of psychological skills that may not be as functionally autonomous as one might think.

            After reviewing some well-established, though recent, links between the onset of crawling and psychological development, this talk will emphasize new investigations showing the interrelation of motor experience, perceptual development, self development, emotion, fear of falling, and social interactions. These studies use new paradigms, crucial but not-widely-recognized outcome assessments, and new approaches to experimentally manipulating locomotor experience (e.g., infant-controlled powered mobility devices). Taken as a whole these studies support the little-acknowledged view of Gottlieb about “probabilistic epigenesis”—how one developmental acquisition creates experiences that make possible new, cascading, developmental acquisitions.

            The talk will end with speculations on the role of motoric experiences other than crawling in accounting for other fascinating “step functions” in development, and will also  speculate on the potential and unrecognized significance of motoric factors in experience-based maintenance of skills already established.