The complexity of childhood development: variability in perspective

The complexity of childhood development is exemplified in the variability of development that is seen across tasks and individuals. Furthermore, variability in performance is omnipresent within individuals across repetitions of a task and across individuals performing the same task. Previously, this variability was thought to reflect error of measurement or error of execution. On this account, variability reflects noise that should be filtered or averaged out of the data in order to reveal the "true" underlying characteristics of the performance. Although errors of measurement and execution indeed contribute to variability in movements, research in the last 2 decades has revealed characteristics of variability that are far more interesting than just noise. These characteristics can be deeply informative about underlying control processes and point to directions for clinical practice. This perspective article reviews different ways of characterizing variability, illustrates changes in variability as a result of development and learning, and discusses different theoretical perspectives on the role of variability that give clues about how to understand changes in variability and how to deal with variability in clinical settings.