Esther Thelen

Who was Esther Thelen?

Esther Thelen was an expert in the field of developmental psychology. Thelen's research was focused on human development, especially in the area of infant development. Thelen applied chaos theory to the research of how babies learn to walk and interact with the world around them. In Thelen's view behavior emerges as a pattern from all the streams that flow into the river of infant development. Or, as she wrote "The mind simply does not exist as something decoupled from the body and experience". Thelen was also President of the Society for Research in Child Development and the International Society for Infant Studies. She was a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and American Psychological Society.