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Sensorimotor development: body schema, postural security, bilateral integration, motor planning. The 6 skills, from child to athlete.
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Sensorimotor development is the third level of the learning pyramid of Taylor and Trott (1991), taken up by Williams and Shellenberger. It groups six skills that turn sensations into organized movement: body schema, reflex maturity, filtering of sensory information, postural security, awareness of both sides of the body and motor planning.
Hello to you, the movement professional,
End of session, a sequence the athlete knows by heart: side shuffle to the right, outside foot plant, rotational medicine ball throw against the wall. Six weeks he has been repeating it, and the ball always slaps the wall in the same spot. You ask for one single change: the same sequence, to the left.
First attempt, the feet cross at the wrong moment. The pelvis turns as one block with the shoulders, the ball leaves late and hits too low. He laughs, a little embarrassed, and starts over in slow motion, eyes glued to his footing. His strength and his mobility are the same as a minute earlier. What gave way sits at the third level of the learning pyramid of Williams and Shellenberger, the one where the body learns to know itself and to organize a movement it has never done before.
The level below delivers the raw information of touch, the vestibular system and proprioception. The third assembles it into skills: knowing where your body is and what you can ignore, holding up against gravity, getting your two sides to cooperate, building a movement you've never done.
In children, all of this is built mostly on the floor and through play, by crawling, rolling, letting themselves drop onto a mattress. These are the developmental floor movements, which nobody programs: children seek them out as long as they are given the room. In adults, the level has been in place for a long time and shows up mostly when facing novelty.
The neurologists Henry Head and Gordon Holmes described a postural "schema" in 1911, a reference the brain keeps up to date to locate the segments of the body. The philosopher Shaun Gallagher distinguishes two notions that tend to be confused (2005). Body schema refers to the sensorimotor capacities that regulate posture and movement without going through consciousness. Body image gathers what the person perceives, thinks and feels about their body. The pyramid is talking about the first.
Ayres saw in the body schema the basis of praxis, fed by somesthesia, that is, touch and proprioception (Lane et al., 2019). This map is drawn through contact and resistance: wriggling through a tunnel, pulling a friend on a mat, carrying a box that is too big.
A child at ease with their map slips under a barrier without brushing it and puts on a coat without looking at their arms. One who is still looking for it bumps into furniture and watches their hands to know what they are doing. In the athlete, the map is read by comparison: precise placement on the right and approximate on the left, a movement that falls apart as soon as the eyes close.
The infant's archaic reflexes fade over the first years to hand the lead to voluntary movement; the pyramid calls this integration reflex maturity. The topic has its own articles, on the difference between inhibiting or integrating an archaic reflex and on the debated question of archaic reflexes in adults. In the logic of the pyramid, a reflex that stayed active imposes a ready-made response where the body map should be deciding.
Filtering means leaving in the background what doesn't matter, among information that is always too abundant. Two mechanisms take part: habituation, which lowers the response to a repeated, harmless stimulus, and sensory gating, which attenuates the response to a redundant stimulus. According to the review by Lane et al. (2019), people who are hyper-reactive to sensations habituate more slowly and filter less efficiently.
In 1997, Winnie Dunn proposed a model that crosses the reaction threshold of the nervous system, high or low, with the way the person responds to it, by following it or fighting it. Four profiles come out of it, from sensation seeking to sensation avoiding.
The child who filters poorly covers their ears in the canteen or turns around at every door that slams, a picture close to sensory immaturity. The athlete zones out in a noisy gym or no longer picks up the instruction shouted from the bench.
Postural security is the body's confidence in its relationship with gravity. Ayres named its opposite gravitational insecurity in Sensory Integration and the Child (1979): a disproportionate fear of movement and of changes in head position (May-Benson and Koomar, 2007). She later linked it to an over-reactivity to vestibular information (Ayres and Tickle, 1980, cited by Lane et al., 2019).
Ayres distinguished this fear from postural insecurity, a caution that comes from weak postural means and comes with little fear. The vestibule, in the inner ear, reports on head accelerations and on gravity as the reference for posture. When its signals are experienced as a threat, every change of position triggers an alert.
This confidence is built in games where the feet leave the ground: the swing, hanging upside down over an adult's knees, jumping from a wall that gets higher and higher. The child who lacks it refuses to lift their feet off the ground and stiffens when tipped backward.
In the athlete, look at the moments of flight and tipping, like the landing of a backward jump or the goalkeeper's dive. The neck freezes, the momentum slows just before the critical instant. After a bad fall, this caution makes sense; when nothing of the kind explains it, look lower down in the pyramid.
Occupational therapists commonly describe a progression, to be read as a practitioner's landmark rather than a measured timetable. The two hands do the same thing, then alternate, and end up dividing the roles, one stabilizing while the other acts. Crossing the midline means moving a hand, a foot or the gaze to the other side of the body's axis. Stilwell measured it in 1987 in 160 children aged 2 to 6: crossing progresses with age and appears more easily when the hand that has to act is imposed.
Ayres tied this box to the vestibule, a bilateral system that acts on the muscles of the whole body. Her work associated a weak vestibular response, measured by post-rotatory nystagmus (the beating of the eyes after a rotation), with poorer bilateral coordination (Lane et al., 2019).
In drawing, the child who stumbles on this box switches hands in the middle of the page to avoid crossing it. In the athlete, the jump rope, the crawl stroke or the backhand betray the same box, just like the trunk that turned as one block in the opening scene. For the benchmark ages and the tests, see the article on crossing the midline.
For Ayres, praxis was the foundation of adaptation to the physical world (1985). Today praxis is split into three steps (Lane et al., 2019): ideation conceives what can be done with your body and an object, planning organizes the sequence, execution carries it out. Ayres held ideation to be essential without assessing it herself; Teresa May-Benson and Sharon Cermak built an ideation test in 2007: in 80 children aged 5 to 8, scores rose with age.
Faced with a new object, the child whose ideation is stuck doesn't know what to do with it and falls back on the one game they know. When planning gives way, they know what they want to achieve but the sequence comes out in disorder, through trial and error. If execution is the weak point, the plan holds and the performance lacks precision.
Back to the medicine ball. The athlete knew what to do and his muscles were capable of it; the reversed sequence had to be rebuilt by hand, hence the gaze stuck on the footing. On the brain side, see the entry on motor planning and the parietal cortex.
Skill | What builds it | When it holds | When it sticks in the child | What you see in the athlete |
|---|---|---|---|---|
Body schema | Contact, pushes, tunnels | Accurate movements without visual control | Bumps into things, watches their hands | Left-right gap, movement that falls apart with eyes closed |
Reflex maturity | Movements of the first years | Voluntary, nuanced responses | Persistent automatic responses | See the dedicated articles |
Sensory filtering | Gradual, chosen exposure | Stable attention despite noise | Covers their ears | Zones out in noise |
Postural security | Swing, upside down, jumps | Accepts leaving the ground | Refuses to leave the ground | Brakes before flight or the fall |
Both sides of the body | Two-handed games | Divided roles, smooth crossing | Switches hands in the middle | Trunk that turns as one block |
Motor planning | New situations, free play | Quickly succeeds at a variant | Reproduces without inventing | Falls apart as soon as one detail changes |
LabO RNP field grid built on the pyramid, with no value as an assessment tool.
Nikolai Bernstein summed up the stakes in 1967: exercise is "repetition without repetition." You pose the same motor problem again, and the athlete solves it a little differently each time (see Bernstein and coordination). In 1979, John Shea and Robyn Morgan had people practice three tasks in blocks or in random order. Blocks gave better results during practice, mixed order won in the retention and transfer tests: this is contextual interference.
In the field, keep the goal and change a single parameter: side, direction, starting position, rhythm, surface or signal. For the medicine ball: to the left, then starting with your back to the wall, then on a visual signal, then catching on one foot. For the child, the course changes on every pass, on all fours or backward, and from time to time they are the one who invents the path, which challenges ideation.
The first attempt is your best piece of information. Watch it without speaking: a hesitation before starting points to ideation, a sequence that gets tangled points to planning, a clean but imprecise plan points to execution. Allow two or three search attempts before correcting, like when you change the ball without a word.
Our field rule of thumb: when the variant passes several times in a row without hesitation, you change another detail, then you mix the variants already acquired in an order the athlete learns at the last moment. This mixing corresponds to what Shea and Morgan tested; changing a parameter of the same task falls under variable practice, a neighboring idea. The episode on variability in motor learning extends this logic.
In Neuro-Postural Reprogramming, we check with a test, a stimulation and a retest that the targeted box has moved. If a skill seems to be giving way in a child, refer to the doctor, the occupational therapist or the psychomotor therapist.
The six boxes come from a practitioners' diagram, and in the brain they overlap widely: body schema feeds praxis, the vestibule serves both postural security and bilateral integration. The praxis profiles Ayres drew from her tests, on the other hand, have been found again by several teams (Lane et al., 2019).
In children with coordination difficulties, the meta-analysis by Smits-Engelsman and colleagues (2013) shows that working on the task itself pays off far more than working only on the supposed underlying functions. Variation therefore stays within the task. Frank Brady (2004) confirms contextual interference across 61 studies (mean effect 0.38), with a clearer effect in basic research (0.57) than in applied research (0.19), and in adults (0.50) than in younger people (0.10). With a child, you mix carefully. Transposing level 3 to the athlete remains our field hypothesis, and it is the retest that confirms or rules it out.
To place this level back in the whole, return to the learning pyramid and its five levels.
The day you change a single detail of a mastered exercise, you finally see what the athlete has learned, and what he had only repeated.
👉 I want to intervene in the right place.
In the learning pyramid of Taylor and Trott, taken up by Williams and Shellenberger, the third level groups six skills that organize movement: body schema, reflex maturity, filtering of sensory information, postural security, awareness of both sides of the body and motor planning.
Body schema regulates posture and movement without going through consciousness. Body image gathers what the person perceives, thinks and feels about their body. The philosopher Shaun Gallagher formalized this distinction in How the Body Shapes the Mind (2005), and the pyramid is about the body schema.
A. Jean Ayres named it in 1979, in Sensory Integration and the Child: a disproportionate fear of movement and of changes in head position, which she later linked to an over-reactivity to vestibular information. Its opposite, postural security, belongs to the sensorimotor level of the pyramid.
Praxis is the ability to conceive, organize and carry out a new movement. It is split into three steps: ideation (knowing what to do), motor planning (organizing the sequence) and execution. A difficulty can affect just one of these steps, and each is spotted in its own way.
Keep the goal of the exercise and change a single parameter at a time: side, direction, starting position, rhythm, surface or signal. Watch the first attempt without correcting, allow two or three search attempts, then change variant as soon as this one holds. Once the variants are acquired, mixing them in an unpredictable order favors retention and transfer, especially in adults.
To the doctor who follows the child, then to an occupational therapist or a psychomotor therapist, who carry out the assessment. The movement professional observes, refers and works on movement. LabO RNP is neither medical nor paramedical, and comes as a complement to a care pathway, never in its place.
Taylor K., Trott M. (1991). Pyramid of Learning, in Williams M.S., Shellenberger S. (1996). How Does Your Engine Run? Albuquerque: TherapyWorks.
Ayres A.J. (1979). Sensory Integration and the Child. Los Angeles: Western Psychological Services.
Ayres A.J. (1985). Developmental Dyspraxia and Adult-Onset Apraxia. Torrance: Sensory Integration International.
Head H., Holmes G. (1911). Sensory disturbances from cerebral lesions. Brain, 34(2-3), 102-254.
Gallagher S. (2005). How the Body Shapes the Mind. Oxford University Press.
Lane S.J. et al. (2019). Neural foundations of Ayres Sensory Integration. Brain Sciences, 9(7), 153.
Dunn W. (1997). The impact of sensory processing abilities on the daily lives of young children and their families: a conceptual model. Infants and Young Children, 9(4), 23-35.
Stilwell J.M. (1987). The development of manual midline crossing in 2- to 6-year-old children. American Journal of Occupational Therapy, 41(12), 783-789.
May-Benson T.A., Cermak S.A. (2007). Development of an assessment for ideational praxis. American Journal of Occupational Therapy, 61(2), 148-153.
May-Benson T.A., Koomar J.A. (2007). Identifying gravitational insecurity in children: a pilot study. American Journal of Occupational Therapy, 61(2), 142-147.
Ayres A.J., Tickle L.S. (1980). Hyper-responsivity to touch and vestibular stimuli as a predictor of positive response to sensory integration procedures by autistic children. American Journal of Occupational Therapy, 34(6), 375-381.
Bernstein N.A. (1967). The Co-ordination and Regulation of Movements. Oxford: Pergamon Press.
Shea J.B., Morgan R.L. (1979). Contextual interference effects on the acquisition, retention, and transfer of a motor skill. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Learning and Memory, 5(2), 179-187.
Brady F. (2004). Contextual interference: a meta-analytic study. Perceptual and Motor Skills, 99(1), 116-126.
Smits-Engelsman B.C.M. et al. (2013). Efficacy of interventions to improve motor performance in children with developmental coordination disorder: a combined systematic review and meta-analysis. Developmental Medicine and Child Neurology, 55(3), 229-237.
By the LabO RNP team
Crossing the midline: definition, age of onset in children, link with laterality and coordination, field tests and the RNP reading.
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