ABSTRACT
The focus of the chapter is the progression of movement coordination, control and skill in infancy through late childhood, interpreted within Bernstein’s (1967) framework for skill acquisition as the mastery of redundant degrees of freedom. We address three key related issues in motor development from a dynamical systems framework: (a) the number and nature of the degrees of freedom regulated; (b) the pathway of change to the emergent patterns of movement coordination; and (c) the redundancy and variability in solutions to coordination and control – all of which change over time as a function of task constraints in the context of motor learning and development.
