Understanding Psychomotor Structure and Development
Psychomotor Structure: An Overview
Psychomotor Structure refers to the way in which different parts of a system are arranged and interconnected, making sense only within the whole. It’s a comprehensive concept where no single subject is isolated. It establishes an interaction between knowledge, emotions, the body, and movement. This interaction is crucial for personal development and the ability to express oneself and interact with the world.
Key Concepts
- Psychomotor: Relates to the connection between cognitive functions and physical movement.
- Psychomotor Structure: The complex relationships that define the experience of the organism in its environment. Personality building and affirmation of self emerge from these relationships.
- Human Behavior: The body, with its plasticity, becomes an expressive instrument for communication and transitive relation.
- Conduct: The final outcome of many interacting processes. Behavior (body) is conditioned by three main factors:
- Volitional capacity (will)
- Cognitive ability (knowledge)
- Ability to act (execution)
- Human Development: A result of successive transformations that allow humans to meet their needs through a process of adaptation to the environment.
Formation of the Psychomotor Structure
The psychomotor structure, resulting from the individual’s interactive relationship with their environment, develops in an ordered sequence:
- Psychosomatic/Tonic Registration: All organic responses are sorted, especially those that do not support other expressions, constituting what some call “body language.”
- Psychomotor Registration: Focuses on the relevant way of representing our body verbally.
- Verbal Registration: Includes not only oral action but also any form of meta-communication, including body language and non-verbal cues.
Levels of Performance
- Tonic-Emotional: Activities to help children improve their relationships with themselves and others, using objects as important support elements and intermediaries of communication. Soft, warm, flexible, and enveloping objects are used.
- Sensory-Motor: Work on the pleasure of perceiving body movement and maturing driving behavior and basic neuromotor skills. Evolution occurs from uncontrolled movement to controlled, purposeful movement. Large, moving objects are used.
- Perceptual-Motor: Discover the joy of intentional movement. Work on the development of body schema, spaces (interior, postural), and times (internal routines connected to external ones), object relationships, and their characteristics, actions, reactions, location, orientation, and organization in space and time. Soft, light, or rigid objects with stable forms are used.
- Projective-Symbolic: Promote the appearance of specific human mental activity. When body movement becomes automated, the child accesses the symbolic level and mental images are formed. Progressively, they recreate the properties of things, beings, and objects, opening them to the outside world and giving them different meanings. They develop their world with others, socializing and creating common projects using language tools. Communication is maximized. We will work on encoders, decoders, imitations, praxia, echopraxia, imitation games, evocation, staging, fantasy, rules, and rituals.
- Signic: Develops arbitrarily between meanings and signifiers. Educators introduce the signs of different languages (musical, mathematical, logical, plastic, etc.) as a means of communicating ideas, feelings, and facts. These signs do not bear any analogical relationship with the action itself.