Motor, Sensory, and Perceptual Development
Motor Development: The Dynamic Systems View
Dynamic systems theory: Infants assemble motor skills for perceiving and acting.
Motivation leads to new motor behaviors that are "tuned" with repetition.
New motor behaviors result from:
Body’s physical properties
Nervous system development
Child’s motivation
Environmental support
Examples: Crawling, reaching, walking.
Motor Development: Reflexes
Reflexes allow infants to respond adaptively before learning.
Rooting reflex: Infant turns head and seeks to suck when cheek is stroked.
Sucking reflex: Infant sucks an object placed in the mouth.
Enables nourishment before associating nipple with food.
Moro reflex: Startle response to sudden noise or movement.
Newborns arch back, throw back head, fling out arms and legs, then rapidly close them.
Some reflexes persist throughout life:
Coughing, sneezing, blinking, shivering, and yawning.
Some reflexes are incorporated into voluntary actions.
Grasping reflex: Infants tightly grasp objects placed in their palm.
Motor Development: Gross Motor Skills
Gross motor skills involve large-muscle activities (e.g., moving arms or walking).
Development of posture requires postural control which is a dynamic process linked with:
Sensory information in the skin, joints, and muscles.
Vestibular organs in the inner ears.
Vision and hearing.
Learning to walk:
Locomotion and postural control are linked.
Infants discover safe surfaces for locomotion.
Timing of milestones varies by 2-4 months.
Experiences can modify the onset of accomplishments.
Infants develop new skills with caregiver guidance.
Second year development:
Motor accomplishments bring independence.
Infants explore more and initiate social interaction.
Few restrictions should be placed on motor activity, except for safety.
13-18 months: Toddlers pull toys and climb steps.
18-24 months: Toddlers walk/run stiffly, balance, walk backward, kick/throw, and jump.
Cultural variations:
Mothers in developing countries stimulate motor skills more than in developed countries through massage and stretching.
Physical guidance and exercise opportunities lead to earlier milestones.
Restricted movements (e.g., sandbags, orphanage restrictions) delay development.
Infants' skill development requires behavioral flexibility for life’s goals and adapting to changing bodies, contexts and tasks.
Gross Motor Skills in Childhood
Young children enjoy simple movements.
Examples: hopping, jumping, running back and forth.
Source of pride and accomplishment.
With age, movements become more adventurous; motor skills become smoother and more coordinated.
Boys usually outperform girls.
Organized sports can be positive or negative.
Gross Motor Skills in Adolescence and Adulthood
Gross motor skills improve during adolescence.
Adults reach peak physical performance before 30.
Decline in biological functioning begins at 30.
Older adults move more slowly.
Mobility is important for an active, independent lifestyle.
Falls are the leading cause of injury deaths for adults 65+.
Motor Development: Fine Motor Skills
Fine motor skills involve finely tuned movements (e.g., finger dexterity).
Infants have little control at birth.
Infants refine their ability to grasp objects.
Palmer grasp: Grasp with whole hand.
Pincer grip: Grasp small objects with thumb and forefinger.
Perceptual-motor coupling is necessary to coordinate grasping, perceptual system used varies with age, and experience plays a role.
Fine Motor Skills in Childhood and Adolescence
Fine motor skills improve with age, supported by increased myelination of the central nervous system.
Children use hands more skillfully as tools.
At ages 10-12, manipulative skills become similar to adults’ abilities.
Complex, intricate, rapid movements.
Produce fine-quality crafts or play difficult music.
Girls usually outperform boys.
Gross and fine motor skills are associated with cognitive function.
Fine Motor Skills: Adult Development
Skills may decline in middle and late adulthood.
Dexterity decreases.
Pathological conditions may cause weakness or paralysis, making fine motor skills impossible.
Sensory and Perceptual Development
Sensation: Reaction when information interacts with sensory receptors (eyes, ears, tongue, nostrils, and skin).
Hearing involves the cochlea and auditory nerve.
Vision involves the retina and optic nerve.
Perception: Interpretation of what is sensed (e.g., specific color, shape, or pattern).
Sensory and Perceptual Development: The Ecological View
Ecological view: We directly perceive information in the world around us.
Perception connects people with the environment for interaction and adaptation.
Affordances: Opportunities for interaction offered by objects that fit within our capabilities.
Example: a pot can be used for cooking or banging on.
Sensory and Perceptual Development: Visual Perception
At birth, the nerves, muscles, and lens of the eye are still developing, and newborns cannot see far away.
Infants show interest in faces and can perceive patterns; perceptual narrowing occurs, allowing them to distinguish between known and new faces.
Infants’ color vision gradually improves with experience.
Development of perceptual constancy allows infants to perceive their world as stable.
Sensory stimulation changes, but perception remains constant.
Size constancy: Recognition that an object remains the same even though the retinal image changes as you move toward or away from the object.
Shape constancy: Recognition that an object remains the same shape even though its orientation to us changes.
Babies as young as 3 months show some size constancy and have shape constancy for regularly shaped objects.
Infants develop the ability to perceive partly occluded objects as whole beginning at about 2 months of age, with learning, experience and self-directed exploration via eye movements playing key roles.
Visual perception of depth is affected by experience.
Researchers do not know exactly how early depth perception develops; but infants use binocular cues to depth by about 3–4 months of age.
Visual Perception in Childhood
Changes in perceptual development continue in childhood.
Children become increasingly efficient in detecting boundaries between colors at 3 to 4 years of age.
Many preschool children are farsighted.
By first grade, most children can focus their eyes and sustain attention effectively on close-up objects.
vision of a baby is 20 over 40
Visual Perception in Adulthood
Vision changes little until the effects of aging emerge.
Visual decline in late adulthood is linked to cognitive decline and having fewer social contacts.
Declines occur.
Visual acuity.
Color vision.
Depth perception.
Accommodation of the eye declines most sharply at 40 through 59 years of age.
Presbyopia, difficulty viewing close objects, and an increased blind spot.
Declines become more pronounced in late adulthood.
Visual processing speed declines; night driving becomes difficult; dark adaptation is slower; and the visual field becomes smaller.
Older adults also show a decline in motion sensitivity.
Color vision may decline in older adults as a result of the yellowing of the lens of the eye.
Most likely to occur in green–blue–violet part of the color spectrum.
Results in trouble matching closely related colors.
Depth perception declines in late adulthood.
Difficult to determine how close or far away or how high or low an object is.
Diseases of the eye:
Cataracts: A thickening of the lens of the eye that causes vision to become cloudy, opaque, and distorted, resulting in partial loss of vision by the age of 70 for about 30% of people.
Glaucoma: Damage to the optic nerve due to pressure created by fluid buildup in the eye.
Macular degeneration: Causes deterioration of the macula of the retina, which corresponds to the focal center of the visual field, resulting in relatively normal peripheral vision but an inability to see clearly right in front of them, which increases the risk of falls.
Sensory and Perceptual Development: Hearing
During the last 2 months of pregnancy, the fetus can hear sounds outside of the womb.
Newborns cannot hear soft sounds as well as adults.
By 3 months, perception improves; but it does not reach adult levels until 5–10 years of age.
Infants are more likely to hear high-pitched than low- pitched sounds.
By 6 months, infants become more proficient at localization—detecting the origin of a sound.
Early hearing screening should be conducted.
Hearing in Adolescence and Adulthood
Listening to loud sounds for a sustained period of time is a risk factor for hearing problems.
Few changes take place until middle adulthood.
Hearing can start to decline by the age of 40.
Sensitivity to high pitches usually declines first.
Hearing impairment does not become much of an impediment until late adulthood.
Older adults often don’t recognize they have a hearing problem, deny they have one, or accept it as part of growing old.
Outcomes of sensory loss in older adults can include:
Reduced social participation.
Less social support.
Increased loneliness.
Greater functional limitations.
Cognitive decline.
Communication problems.
Depressive symptoms.
Sensory and Perceptual Development: Touch and Pain
Newborns respond to touch and can feel pain.
Practice of operating on newborns without anesthesia is being reconsidered.
Older adults may detect touch much less in the lower extremities (ankles, knees, etc.).
Estimated 60\%–75\% of older adults report some persistent pain.
Older adults have lower pain sensitivity for lower pain intensities.
Severe pain affects memory and executive function tasks.
The retina declines from age 40-59 for most people
Sensory and Perceptual Development: Smell
Newborns can differentiate odors.
Decline in sensitivity to odors may occur as early as the 20s, with continuing decline each decade into the nineties.
Beginning in the 60s, decrease in sensitivity to smell becomes more noticeable, which reduces the ability to detect smoke from a fire and can reduce older adults’ enjoyment of food and their life satisfaction.
Sensory and Perceptual Development: Taste
Sensitivity to taste is present even before birth.
Newborns learn tastes prenatally through the amniotic fluid and in breast milk after birth.
At about 4 months, they begin to prefer salty tastes.
Many older adults prefer highly seasoned foods to compensate for diminished taste and smell.
Intermodal Perception
Intermodal perception: The ability to integrate information about two or more sensory modalities, such as vision or hearing.
Early, exploratory forms of intermodal perception exist in newborns.
Become sharpened by experience in the first year of life.
Nature/Nurture and Perceptual Development
Nativists view the ability to perceive the world in a competent, organized way as inborn or innate.
Empiricists emphasize the role of learning and experience.
Much of very early perception develops from innate (nature) foundations, but environmental experiences (nurture) refine or calibrate some functions and may drive others.
Perceptual-Motor Coupling
Distinction between perceiving and doing has been called into question by a number of experts.
Perception and action do not occur in isolation, but instead are coupled.
Infants learn new perceptual-motor coupling by assembling skills for perceiving and acting.
Age-related declines are experienced in perceptual-motor coupling in middle and late adulthood.
Older adults can compensate, and may see improvement, with cognitive training.
Diseases of the eyes
Cataracts: a thickening of the lens of the eye.
•Causes vision to become cloudy, opaque, and distorted.
•Results in partial loss of vision by the age of 70 for about 30% of people.
Glaucoma: damage to the optic nerve due to pressure created by fluid buildup in the eye.
Macular degeneration: causes deterioration of the macula of the retina, which corresponds to the focal center of the visual field.
•Relatively normal peripheral vision but unable to see clearly right in front of them.
Increases risk of falls.
During the last 2 months of pregnancy, the fetus can hear sounds outside of the womb.
Newborns cannot hear soft sounds as well as adults.
•By 3 months, perception improves; but it does not reach adult levels until 5–10 years of age.
Infants are more likely to hear high-pitched than low-pitched sounds.
By 6 months, infants become more proficient at localization—detecting the origin of a sound.
Early hearing screening should be conducted
1 in 1000 newborns are deaf
Listening to loud sounds for a sustained period of time is a risk factor for hearing problems.
Few changes take place until middle adulthood.
•Hearing can start to decline by the age of 40.
•Sensitivity to high pitches usually declines first.
Hearing impairment does not become much of an impediment until late adulthood.
•Older adults often don’t recognize they have a hearing problem, deny they have one, or accept it as part of growing old.
Newborns respond to touch and can feel pain.
•Practice of operating on newborns without anesthesia is being reconsidered.
Older adults may detect touch much less in lower extremities (ankles, knees, etc.).
Estimated 60%–75% of older adults report some persistent pain.
•Older adults have lower pain sensitivity for lower pain intensities.
Severe pain affects memory and executive function tasks
Newborns can differentiate odors.
Decline in sensitivity to odors may occur as early as the 20s, with continuing decline each decade into the nineties.
Beginning in the 60s, decrease in sensitivity to smell becomes more noticeable.
•Reduces the ability to detect smoke from a fire.
•Can reduce older adults’ enjoyment of food and their life satisfaction.
Sensitivity to taste is present even before birth.
•Newborns learn tastes prenatally through the amniotic fluid and in breast milk after birth.
•At about 4 months, they begin to prefer salty tastes.
Many older adults prefer highly seasoned foods to compensate for diminished taste and smell.
Intermodal perception: the ability to integrate information about two or more sensory modalities, such as vision or hearing.
Early, exploratory forms of intermodal perception exist in newborns.
Become sharpened by experience in the first year of life
Dynamic Systems View = The Avengers assembling the ultimate move
Imagine infants like the Avengers team. Each hero (body parts, nervous system, motivation, environment) comes together to create the perfect motor skill attack — like crawling, reaching, or walking.
Just like how Tony Stark’s tech + Cap’s shield + Thor’s hammer come together for the win, babies assemble their moves with motivation and practice, tuning their skills over time. Every time they try again, they get sharper — like upgrading their gear!
Reflexes = Baby Mission: Impossible Auto-Reactions
Reflexes are like those secret Mission Impossible auto-systems — before Ethan Hunt even thinks, his gadgets are working.
Rooting reflex = baby’s built-in tracker — when their cheek’s touched, boom, head turns looking for the “target” (food)!
Sucking reflex = automatic fuel intake mode — keeps them nourished before they even know what food is.
Moro reflex = emergency escape jetpack! Startle the baby, and they throw their arms and legs out like a sudden dramatic stunt.
Some reflexes stick around forever — like blinking and sneezing, the OG defense systems!
Gross Motor Skills = Top Gun flying the skies
Gross motor skills? That’s like Maverick learning how to fly those fighter jets perfectly.
Posture control = the plane’s stability system, combining inputs from vision, hearing, inner ear balance — all synced for smooth flying.
Walking = the ultimate flight mission, but on land!
Every baby is like a rookie pilot figuring out safe runways (floor textures) and adjusting their moves for takeoff.
Cultural differences? Some get extra Top Gun coaching (massage/stretching), and some are grounded longer due to restrictions — that’s why timelines vary!
Fine Motor Skills = Iron Man’s precision tech
Fine motor skills are like Tony Stark’s fingers flying over his control panel, super precise.
Palmer grasp = Tony gripping his gadgets with his whole hand.
Pincer grip = that laser-focused finger move picking up tiny things like a mini hacking tool.
As kids grow, they become expert tech hackers — crafting, playing music, and making crazy intricate moves!
Girls usually outperform boys here, kinda like how Black Widow’s stealth beats most.
Sensory & Perceptual Development = The Avengers’ sensory suit-up
Think of the senses as different Avengers scanning the battlefield.
Vision = Hawkeye’s super-sharp targeting system. Newborns start blurry, but soon they can zoom in and spot faces (team members) and shapes.
Hearing = Thor’s lightning senses, detecting sounds even in the womb and getting better with age.
Touch and Pain = like Spider-Man’s “spidey sense” alerting to danger or discomfort.
Smell and Taste = Guardians of the Galaxy’s cosmic radar, sensing all the flavors and odors in the environment.
Aging = The final epic sequel with challenges
Just like how Iron Man’s suit wears down and Maverick faces new challenges flying older jets, as people age:
Vision blurs, colors fade (like when your HUD gets glitchy).
Hearing drops, especially high-pitched sounds — the battle communication gets tougher.
Reflexes slow, motor skills aren’t as sharp — like Ethan Hunt moving slower in his later missions but using experience to adapt.
Diseases like cataracts and glaucoma = villain attacks on your vision system, risking falls or injury.
But hey, like our heroes, people adapt — using training, tech, and support to keep performing their best!
Intermodal perception = The ultimate team combo move
Combining senses? That’s like Avengers’ team synergy — vision + hearing + touch all working together to tackle the mission perfectly.
Babies start with basic combo moves and get crazy skilled by their first year — ready to face any challenge.