Tag Archives: development

Smooth movements result from coordination

A baby moves a hand to its mouth, the muscles contract, the head wobbles. For this, its muscles must collaborate, which is called coordination. It seems so natural. As adults, when we put food in our mouths, we do this automatically. However, coordination does no come so naturally, and only develops with a lot of practice. This means that repetition of coordinated movements is necessary – in this case navigating the hand towards the mouth. Babies practice with arbitrary, crisscross movements, until they succeed.

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Overrating milestones

I wasn’t the only one who couldn’t see everything that happened during the couple of months before my daughter could roll over: also in science, the thought has been that only measurable things count. These were the so-called milestones in the sensorimotor development, like rolling over. Assumed was that sensorimotor skills would develop first, and then cognition. This was first reported by Jean Piaget.

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