ABSTRACT
Development is fundamentally concerned with the change in behavior that occurs over the lifespan. Motor development realizes phenomena of change that are as or more obvious than many other forms of development, particularly when one observes at the extremes of the life span the periods of infancy and aging. In short, there are many qualitative and quantitative changes that are evident in movement coordination and control over the life span (McGraw, 1945; Shirley, 1931; Thelen, 1984; Woollacott, 1989). Some of these changes in motor development seem very orderly, such as the sequential structure evident in the development of the fundamental movement skills in infancy, whereas others, such as the onset of certain movement disorders in aging, seem essentially stochastic in nature. The deterministic and stochastic properties apparent in the organization of motor development provide a rich set of dynamical phenomena for the application of the concepts and tools of nonlinear dynamics and chaos theory.
