neatly. She used only her right hand with no use of her left hand. The six-year-old male subject was very confident with his abilities involving this task. He quick stacked a total of twelve blocks using only one hand. His attention shifted back and forth between the block tower and the audience. He made few adjustments and responded to the professor while simultaneously stacking blocks. Overall, as ages of the children increased, their abilities increased and their level of focus and attention required to complete the task decreased.
             Analysis of motor development in child psychology dates back as far as 1877, to Darwin's well known "baby biography" in which he made daily records of his own child's development. His interest in child development stemmed from his earlier theory of evolution, in that the development of an individual child retraces the entire evolutionary history of the species (Thelen, 2000).
             The full flowering of the descriptive work in motor development began in the 1920s with the publication of the first of A. Gesell's path breaking research. His works in development was grounded in biology and was regarded as a way to understand the most general, and profound, developmental principles. He argued that behavioral changes followed biologically driven neural maturation, and not the other way around. His influence was felt through the many child psychologists and pediatricians he helped educate. Eventually, the preeminence of Gesell's ideas gave way to theories that stressed the importance of environmental rather than internal elements in child development, as the ideas of Jerome S. Bruner and Jean Piaget gained prominence. In the 1930s, M. Shirley and M. McGraw also shared the maturational viewpoint. Shirley conducted longitudinal studies with infants whereas McGraw conducted an intense study on identical twins in which she found that denial of practice to one twin had little effect on his ...