Esther Thelen was an expert in the field of Developmental Psychology

Developmental psychology

Developmental psychology, also known as human development, is the scientific study of systematic psychological changes, emotional changes, and perception changes that occur in human beings over the course of their life span. Originally concerned with infants and children, the field has expanded to...

. Thelen's research was focused on human development, espeically infant development.
Thelen applied chaos theory

Chaos theory

Chaos theory is a field of study in mathematics, with applications in several disciplines including physics, economics, biology, and philosophy. Chaos theory studies the behavior of dynamical systems that are highly sensitive to initial conditions, an effect which is popularly referred to as the...

 to the research of how babies learn to walk and interact with world around them..
Thelen was also President of the Society for Research in Child Development

Society for Research in Child Development

The Society for Research in Child Development is a professional society for the field of developmental psychology, focusing specifically on child development. It is a multidisciplinary, not-for-profit, professional association with a membership of approximately 5,500 researchers, practitioners,...

 and the International Society for Infant Studies. She was a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science

American Association for the Advancement of Science

The American Association for the Advancement of Science is an international non-profit organization with the stated goals of promoting cooperation among scientists, defending scientific freedom, encouraging scientific responsibility, and supporting scientific education and science outreach for the...

 and American Psychological Society.

Developmental Implications

Edleman in his theory of neuronal development showed that development occurs in the brain between neuro-networks that overlap and interconnect. The epigenetic process of neural development is grounded in the idea of experience-dependent changes which is development or growth by selectively and simultaneously reinforcing neural pathways. The figure to the left shows the development of a behavior. As children, humans are constantly moving and interacting. Visual and kinematic information becomes mapped together in the brain and the pathways are strengthened and retained through every interaction. When the child encounters a novel or new skill, the child takes a similar previously learned motor map and apply it to the new novel skill. As the novel skill develops into a new behavior, it then in turn can be used to help develop future skills. Recurrent activities in the world reinforce this Dynamical systems theory

Dynamical systems theory

Dynamical systems theory is an area of applied mathematics used to describe the behavior of complex dynamical systems, usually by employing differential equations or difference equations. When differential equations are employed, the theory is called continuous dynamical systems. When difference...

of development and helps explain the constructivist view of the Developmental Systems Theory.