Learning occurs through dynamic interactions and exchanges with the physical environment
and the social world. In recent years, increasing attention has been paid to the contributions
of a healthy and well-functioning motor system for children's learning. Consequently,
it seems evident that motor development is critical for children's understanding of
the physical and social world. The current Research Topic examines this timely question
and provides a comprehensive overview of the current state of the field on the role
of motor skills during development.
A total of 27 articles, covering applied and theoretical perspectives, are included
in this Research Topic and examine the cascading influences of motor skills on perceptual,
social, and cognitive processes. The contributions include both general overviews
by review articles, presentation of novel findings in empirical articles, and opinion
pieces that discuss future directions. Broadly speaking, the Research Topic covers
three areas: First, articles that examine and describe the relation between motor
skills and cognitive, perceptual, or social skills. Second, articles that discuss
practical applications and implications by examining the role played by motor skills
in developmental disorders. And third, articles that explore the direct effects of
motor experiences on development across domains using training and enrichment paradigms.
We will introduce and discuss each of these three areas in the following.
How do motor skills influence cognitive, social, and perceptual development?
Previous research has identified close connections between motor experiences and development
in other domains. As part of this research topic, Michel et al. review the literature
on the development of infants' hand preference and find that those infants with consistent
hand preferences early in development also show advanced cognitive development. This
suggests that infants who show an early and stable hand preference may follow a different
developmental pathway than infants who develop a hand preference later and provides
evidence for the impact of motor experiences on cognitive development. However, this
phenomenon is not limited to the development of handedness. For example, Libertus
and Violi report that 3- to 5-month-old infants with faster rates of learning to sit
independently show larger receptive vocabularies at both 10 and 14 months of age.
Similarly, Ross-Sheehy et al. examined the relation between sitting and figure-ground
assignment in 6.5-month-old infants and find that only infants who can sit independently
use symmetry as a cue for figure-ground assignment. Together, these results indicate
that the development of posture skills may alter infant's visual perception and language
learning. Additional support for the importance of posture during learning comes from
a study including both infants and robot models showing that posture can affect the
mapping of words to objects (Morse et al., 2015). Walking is another motor milestone
that has been shown to initiate developmental cascades affecting infants' social interactions
(Karasik et al., 2014) and language development (Walle and Campos, 2014). In this
collection, Walle examined the effects of walking acquisition on social development
and parent's perception of their child by longitudinally following infants from 10.5
to 13 months of age. Results show an increase in infants' joint engagement (both initiation
and following) with increasing walking experiences, and an increase in parent's perception
of their child as an individual following walking onset. This provides evidence for
the cascading effects that motor experiences have on infant's own behavior and the
behavior of parents and others interacting with the child. Similarly, Karasik et al.
examined how locomotor experience (either crawling or walking) affects infants' extraction
and use of information to guide their future actions. Their results show that infants
with more locomotor experiences were more likely to use social information to guide
their actions than novice walkers.
Together, the studies summarized above provide strong evidence for a relation between
motor experience and cognitive, social, or perceptual development in infancy. However,
other contributions in this Research Topic show such a relation becomes less clear
in older children. For example, Nakagawa et al. examined how temperament is related
to both motor coordination and sensory processing in 3-year-old children. Their results
suggest that effortful control (i.e., temperament) affects both motor and sensory
domains. Thus, it is possible that motor experiences and perceptual development appear
related because both are affected by a child's temperament. Similarly, De Jonge-Hoekstra
et al. conducted real-time observations between gestures and speech in 4 to 7-year-olds
and report changes in gesture-language synchrony over time. This suggests that the
influences of motor experiences on other domains may change as children grow older.
In fact, Oudgenoeg-Paz et al. examined the relation between walking onset and subsequent
linguistic skills at 3.5 years of age and found no relation between age of walking
onset and language at 43 months of age. This contrasts with previous studies reporting
a positive relation between these skills in infancy (e.g., He et al., 2015) and suggests
that the relation between motor and language development may diminish over time. Supporting
this view, Kenny et al. examined the relation between social cognition (i.e., theory
of mind) and motor skills in primary school aged children and reported no relation
between motor and social skills. This argues that social and motor processes may be
independent in school aged children. Similarly, Hagmann-von Arx et al. quantified
gait characteristics in 6.7–13.2 year-old children and found that gait alterations
were not related to children's cognition or psychosocial functioning. Thus, despite
the growing evidence for associations between motor and cognitive, social, or perceptual
development during the first 2–3 years of life, this relation seems absent or at least
masked once children enter Kindergarten.
However, there is also evidence that connections between motor experiences and cognitive
development may exist beyond infancy but are limited to specific domains of cognition.
Specifically, two studies in this Research Topic provide evidence for a relation between
motor development and mathematics in Kindergarten and primary school aged children.
First, Frick and Möhring report that children's ability to balance on one leg at age
6 years predicts their proportional reasoning skills assessed 1 year later. And second,
Pitchford et al. report that fine motor skills (i.e., Fine Motor Precision and Fine
Motor Integration) were a significant predictor of math abilities in 4- to 6-year-old
primary school students. These studies suggest that motor skills can be predictive
of cognitive skills beyond infancy—at least in the domain of mathematical cognition.
Together, the studies reported in this collection suggest an interesting shift in
the relation between motor skills and other developmental domains over time. Specifically,
motor skills seem highly related to other developmental domains during the first 3
years of life, but this relation seems to weaken or disappear as children grow older—with
the one notable exception being a positive relation between motor and math skills
that persists until at least age 6.
Are motor skills impaired in developmental disorders?
If motor experiences are indeed important for cognitive, social, or perceptual development,
it should be expected that delays in motor skills are associated with impaired cognitive,
social, or perceptual development as well. Three review articles present evidence
for this position. First, Einspieler et al. review findings showing that general movements
as assessed using The Prechtl General Movement Assessment at 2, 3, or 5 months of
age are predictive of subsequent cognitive development in children born preterm. This
shows that the infant's motor repertoire during the first months of life is predictive
of cognitive outcomes. Second, Leonard reviews evidence for impaired perceptual, social,
and cognitive skills in children with Developmental Coordination Disorder (DCD). And
third, Mancini et al. review evidence supporting the Elaborated Environmental Stress
Hypothesis which suggests that poor motor skills predispose children for subsequent
internalizing problems. These reviews strongly support that poor motor skills may
be predictive of impaired cognitive, social, or perceptual development.
Further support for the notion that poor performance in basic motor skills may be
predictive of developmental delays in other domains comes from research with infants
later diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). In the current collection, Landa
et al. examined the presence of motor delays in ASD and report that 6- and 14-month-old
infants at high familial risk for ASD (HR infants) show reduced anticipatory motor
responses during a social interaction involving an object. Similarly, St. John et
al. report poor executive functioning (EF) in HR infants at 24 months of age. Critically,
poor motor skills at both 12 and 24 months were associated with poor EF performance
in HR infants. Motor skills in ASD were also examined by Focaroli et al. who recorded
movement kinematics during object exploration in HR children at 18, 24, and 36 months.
In their study, HR children showed slower reaching movements compared to low-risk
children, providing further evidence for delayed fine motor skills in ASD. And finally,
Mancini et al. provide empirical evidence for the Elaborated Environmental Stress
Hypothesis by showing that poor motor skills can indirectly increase depression in
adolescents by influencing perceived family support. Together, these studies show
that motor delays and abnormalities are common in children with developmental disorders
and that cognitive, social, or perceptual delays are often preceded and potentially
exasperated by motor deficits.
What experiences affect children's motor development?
The papers presented in this Research Topic show that motor skills are important for
a child's healthy development across domains and that early motor delays may be predictive
or elevated risk for developmental disorders or mental health problems later in life.
These observations raise the question: Can we improve a child's motor skills and should
intervention efforts include this domain? The short answer to both questions is yes.
Indeed, several studies included in this Research Topic show that training motor skills
is both feasible and effective. Wiesen et al. provided 3-month-old infants with scaffolded
reaching experiences using ‘sticky mittens’ (Needham et al., 2002; Libertus and Landa,
2014) and examined training effects immediately after training and 2 months later.
Their results show that trained infants showed improved object engagement and exploration,
both immediately after training and after a 2-month delay (without further training
in the meantime). This confirms previous results and shows that early motor training
can be beneficial for typical developing infants (e.g., Libertus et al., 2016). Ryalls
et al. report on the effects of sitting training in children with moderate or severe
cerebral palsy (CP). Their results show that sitting skills could be improved in children
with CP (ages 18 months to 6 years) using a perceptual motor intervention. More importantly,
improvements in children's sitting skills were also associated with improvements in
functional play skills in children 3 years of age or older—skills that may support
future learning and development. And finally, Pesce et al. provided 5- to 10-year-old
children with enriched physical education (PE) and examined the impact of this experience
on their cognitive abilities. Results show that children who received the enriched
PE improved their motor coordination skills, and in those children who received enriched
PE and showed higher levels of spontaneous outdoor play an improvement in inhibition
skills was observed as well. These findings indicate that motor enrichment can have
positive influences on children's cognitive development, but only if the children
are already physically active on their own. Consequently, motor activity and engagement
should be encouraged in all children and may increase the effectiveness of instruction
or intervention procedures.
Open questions
The findings summarized in this Research Topic address several timely questions on
the role of motor experiences during development and increase our understanding of
the developmental process and its dynamic connections across domains that are typically
studied in isolation. However, several questions remain unanswered. For example, the
mechanism behind the observed relations between the motor and other domains remains
poorly understood. Studies on the neural basis of such relations are needed to address
this question. In this collection, Gonzalez et al. summarize findings that examine
the effect of motor experiences on the brain by using electroencephalography (EEG)
measures such as power, coherence, and my desynchronization. Unfortunately, findings
to date are not conclusive and the authors note that more longitudinal research is
needed to understand the neural mechanism underlying developmental cascades initiated
by motor experiences.
Further, the various factors that influence motor development itself remain largely
unknown as well. For example, what is the role of mother's behavior and health for
a child's motor development? Piallini et al. show that even sub-clinical symptoms
of psychopathology in the mother can affect infant's motor development during the
first year of life. These findings highlight the importance of the mother-child dyad
and their interactions for a child's development over time.
While the findings presented in this Research Topic indicate that good motor skills
are associated with positive developmental outcomes in other domains, it remains unclear
whether motor skills are directly related to cognitive, social, and perceptual development,
or whether motor skills and the other domains are both influences by a third factor—such
as the mother's health. Given the results of the training studies reported here and
elsewhere, it seems likely that motor experiences have at least some direct influence
on development in other domains. However, future research is needed to investigate
this hypothesis. We hope that the collection presented in this Research Topic will
encourage such research and stimulate a broader discussion on the importance of motor
experiences during childhood in our daycares and school settings.
Author contributions
KL wrote the first draft of this editorial and PH edited consecutive versions. Both
authors have agreed on the final version. The overall research topic has been conceptualized
equally by KL and PH.
Funding
KL has been supported by a Slifka/Ritvo Innovation in Autism Research Award.
Conflict of interest statement
The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial
or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.