Esther Thelen
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Esther Thelen | |
|---|---|
| Born | 20 May 1941 |
| Died | 29 December 2004 (aged 63) Bloomington, Indiana |
| Alma mater | Antioch College University of Wisconsin University of Missouri |
| Known for | Developmental psychology dynamical systems theory neuroscience |
Esther Thelen (May 20, 1941 – December 29, 2004) was an expert in the field of developmental psychology.[1] Thelen's research was focused on human development, especially in the area of infant development.[2]
Thelen was also president of the Society for Research in Child Development and the International Society for Infant Studies. She was a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and American Psychological Society.[3]
Thelen is known for her works on infant development, particularly those that focused on complex movement and behavioral development.[4] Thelen applied chaos theory to the research of how babies learn to walk and interact with the world around them.[5] In Thelen's view behavior emerges as a pattern from all the streams that flow into the river of infant development. Or, as she wrote "The mind simply does not exist as something decoupled from the body and experience".[6] She suggested that an infant already has basic motor patterns at birth as demonstrated by stepping reflex and spontaneous kicking.[7]
Development model
Thelen's works expanded Gerald Edelman's model of development by proposing a broader conceptualization of development.[8] Edelman, in his theory of neuronal development, showed that development occurs in the brain between neuro-networks that overlap and interconnect. The epigenetic process of neural development is grounded in the idea of experience-dependent changes which is development or growth by selectively and simultaneously reinforcing neural pathways.[9] As children, humans are constantly moving and interacting. Visual and kinematic information becomes mapped together in the brain and the pathways are strengthened and retained through every interaction.[9] When the child encounters a novel or new skill, the child takes a similar previously learned motor map and applies it to the new novel skill. As the novel skill develops into a new behavior, it then in turn can be used to help develop future skills. Recurrent activities in the world reinforce this Dynamical systems theory of development and helps explain the constructivist view of the Developmental Systems Theory. Thelen's contribution in this area involves the notion that the nature of physical development is not absolute but flexible.[10]
According to Thelen, development is self-reorganization (with the self pertaining to the system instead of the psychoanalytic self) that emerges due to the interaction of the system/organization/person with another or the environment.[8]
Neural connections
Edelman used the terms reentrant and degenerate in order to describe these complex neural connections. Reentrant was defined as a complex interwoven system in which the output can feed back into the input. Reentry is a two way straight that can run in parallel. Degenerate was explained by saying that the pathway can be jointly determined by multiple causes and isn't determined by just one thing. This joint determination by multiple causality is one major theme of developmental systems theory that also overlaps with the dynamical systems theory by Esther Thelen. An example of how multiple causes can lead to one action is human movement. In the body, the brain can send many different signals to cause movements such as speech. These signals sent from the brain go to many different muscles in order to control the movement as we speak a word. Figure 3 (shown at right) shows in a very simplistic way the directionality of the neural connections.[9]
