The Development of Dance in Early Childhood

Abstract

Dancing to music is prevalent across human cultures. It is also developmentally precocious—most children display dance-like behaviors before their first birthday. This early emergence precedes a long maturational trajectory with broad individual differences. Here, we survey recent research on dance in infancy and childhood. We propose that investigating early musical movements is useful for understanding the development of dance itself and that dance can serve as a behavioral measure to better understand development in adjacent domains, such as auditory perception and musical memory. Finally, we discuss potential developmental mechanisms underlying early dance and highlight major remaining questions. Studying early dance provides an opportunity to highlight how fundamental processes in psychology, such as nature-nurture interactions, individual differences, and the interplay between abilities and environments, can impact the emergence and expression of this social and multimodal human behavior.