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Education
Ph.D., University of Missouri, 1977
Professional Experience
- Associate Editor, Developmental Psychobiology, 19861991
- President, International Society for Infant Studies, 1996-98
Awards
- NIH Research Career Development Award, 1982-87
- Research Scientist Development Award, NIMH, 1988-93
- Research Scientist Award, 1993-1998
- 1984 Boyd McCandless Award, Division 7, APA
Research Interests
I am interested in the early acquisition of motor skill. The
primary question is how the brain comes to control the limbs
and body segments, which are physical effectors with mass
and elastic qualities. Traditional information-processing or
symbol string models cannot explain this mind-body link.
We have adopted instead a dynamical systems approach,
which focuses on the self-organizing qualities of complex,
nonlinear systems. My current research asks how infants
learn basic skills such as walking and reaching by
comparing the kinematics of their movements with the
underlying kinetics, or control of forces.
Representative Publications
Thelen, E. & Ulrich, B. D. (1991). Hidden skills: A dynamic systems analysis of treadmill-elicited stepping during the first year.
Monographs of the
Society for Research in Child Development, 56, No. 223.
Thelen, E. & Smith, L. B. (1994). A dynamics systems approach to the development of cognition and action.
Cambridge, MA: Bradford Books/MIT
Press.
Thelen, E. (1995). Motor development: A new synthesis.
American Psychologist, 50(2), 79-95.
Corbetta, D. & Thelen, E. (1996). The developmental origins of bimanual coordination.
Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 22, 502-522.
Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 22, 1059-1076.
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