School of Kinesiology professor Michael G. Wade, Ph.D., and colleague Karl M. Newell, University of Georgia, have published a book chapter in the latest edition of Advances in Child Development and Behavior series, Volume 55 (2018).  Their chapter, titled “Physical Growth, Body Scale, and Perceptual Motor Development,” appears in the latest volume of the series, Studying the Perception-Action System as a Model System for Understanding Development. 

The authors consider the relations between physical growth and body scale in the context of children’s perceptual-motor development from the theoretical framework of the ecological approach to perception and action. Body scale and the timescale of its change through growth are shown to relate to the emergence and dissolution of the fundamental skills in infancy and the perception of what an environment affords functionally for action, together with the emergent pattern of movement coordination.