Motor Skills, Motor Competence and Children: Bruner’s Ideas in the Era of Embodiment Cognition and Action

Abstract

A most relevant contribution of Jerome Bruner to Motor Development research has been to highlight its relevance to child development and avoiding considering it as an epiphenomenon accompanying other evolutionary events of greater importance, such as cognitive, emotional or language development. Bruner’s ideas in the era of embodied cognition continue to be very interesting and show that they were very advanced for his time. His ideas present a child embedded in the context of action, a thinking body that play and explore his environment; a child that exercise his modular routines for the attainment of competence in his environment; a child that has a true impulse to apply and vary his actions to solve motor problems; a child who learns with his whole body, perceives with his whole body and communicates with the adult with his whole body. His cognition is embodied and extended to the others and to the environment. The child´s actions are his knowledge, and his knowledge is in his actions. The child plays and explores his surroundings in true perception- action cycles, where perception influences action and action influences perception. Bruner’s ideas of skill development were well beyond of his time, new and provocative. Forty years later, many of these ideas continue to be relevant today for many researchers.