Motor development research : II. The first two decades of the 21st century shaping our future

Whitall, Jill and Bardid, Farid and Getchell, Nancy and Pangelinan, Melissa and Robinson, Leah E. and Schott, Nadja and Clark, Jane E. (2020) Motor development research : II. The first two decades of the 21st century shaping our future. Journal of Motor Learning and Development, 8 (2). pp. 363-390. ISSN 2325-3215 (https://doi.org/10.1123/jmld.2020-0007)

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Abstract

In Part I of this series I, we looked back at the 20 th century and re-examined the history of Motor Development research described in Clark & Whitall’s 1989 paper “What is Motor Development? The Lessons of History”. We now move to the 21 st century, where the trajectories of developmental research have evolved in focus, branched in scope, and diverged into three new areas. These have progressed to be independent research areas, co-existing in time. We posit that the research focus on Dynamical Systems at the end of the 20 th century has evolved into a Developmental Systems approach in the 21 st century. Additionally, the focus on brain imaging and the neural basis of movement have resulted in a new approach, which we entitled Developmental Motor Neuroscience. Finally, as the world-wide obesity epidemic identified in the 1990s threatened to become a public health crisis, researchers in the field responded by examining the role of motor development in physical activity and health-related outcomes; we refer to this research area as the Developmental Health approach. The glue that holds these research areas together is their focus on movement behavior as it changes across the lifespan.

ORCID iDs

Whitall, Jill, Bardid, Farid ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8591-0596, Getchell, Nancy, Pangelinan, Melissa, Robinson, Leah E., Schott, Nadja and Clark, Jane E.;
CORE (COnnecting REpositories)