The representation of the human movement: development and social aspects

Abstract

Research addressing the representation of human movement is not very wide. Where there is work on this subject it was noticed that young children tend to represent the initial and the end states of the movement. Only older children reproduce the intermediary transformations between the end states. My hypothesis is that some types of movements, which are more sequential, defined and easy to segment, may offer the necessary conditions for the representation of intermediary as well as the end states of movement. In the Concrete Drawing Experiment, children aged 5, 7 and 10 from England and Brazil and from different socio-economic backgrounds were given the task of representing dance steps from a classical and a popular dance. The results suggest that a strategy to represent the intermediary states was used by most subjects and that socio-economic conditions and culture affected representations.