The development of action cognition

Humans learn motor skills over an extended period of time, in parallel with many other cognitive changes. The ways in which action cognition develops and links to social and executive cognition are under investigation. Recent literature is reviewed which fi nds evidence that infants advance from chaotic movement to adult-like patterns in the fi rst two or three years of life, and that their motor performance continues to improve and develop into the teenage years. Studies of links between motor and cognitive systems suggest that motor skill is weakly linked to executive function and more robustly predicts social skill. Few, if any, models account directly for these patterns of results, so the different categories of models available are described.