Motor Development and Control
In the motor domain our lab was primarily interested in how children and adults maintain balance and effectively move through the world. Professor Rosengren has conducted research on how children and adults control their balance, how specific experiences such as learning T’ai Chi lead to improvements in the way older adults move, and how factors such as the equipment and fatigue influence firefighters’ balance and walking.
Integration of Cognitive and Motor Development
Most behavior emerges from the complex interaction of different factors with the individual child, the task they are confronted with, and then the environment they are in. Professor Rosengren has two lines of research that look at how cognitive and motor development interact over childhood. The first area focusing on children’s action errors – where young children (and sometimes adults!) attempt to perform an action on an object that cannot be successfully completed because the object is too small (scale error), the object is depicted in a photograph (grasping error), or the object is available on digital media (media errors). The second area focuses on the development of children’s drawings. Children’s drawings have long been used in a wide range of assessments, focusing primarily on the final drawing. Professor Rosengren investigates the underlying processes that influence the final product.