Bimanual Coordination Development Is Enhanced in Young Females and Experienced Athletes

Abstract

We characterize bimanual coordination development for the first time in a large sample of children (n = 303) in relation to age, sex, and athletic experience. A further aim is to document the effect of these factors on development to indirectly gain insight into the neural processes that underlie this advanced level of eye–hand coordination. This was a cross-sectional design involving three age groups (range: 9–15 years) that were further separated by sex and level of athletic experience. Participants completed two bimanual tasks and a unimanual control task. While there was no significant change in unimanual movement speed, we observed that females performed the bimanual tasks faster, compared with males. Further, we found that select-level athletes had superior bimanual abilities. Lastly, we found an interaction of sex and skill across age. All groups achieved significant improvement in bimanual coordination with the exception of nonselect males. These data provide a description of normal bimanual coordination development in children during the developmentally crucial ages of 9–15 years, taking account of sex- and experience-related differences.

Sport experience is correlated with complex motor skill recovery in youth following concussion

“…Potential age-related effects may have been washed out because of the large sports-related experience range (1-12 years) in a group with a relatively smaller age range (8-15 years). A few other studies have reported sex-related differences in children and adults for bimanual and complex eye-hand coordination tasks, as well as in concussion rates and symptom-related recovery post-concussion (Albines et al, 2016;Black, Cat, Sergio, & Macpherson, 2016;Gorbet & Sergio, 2007;Karlin, 2011;Lenroot & Giedd, 2010). However, we did not find effects of sex on CMI recovery or performance.…”

“…Age is another potentially relevant recovery factor since complex cognitive–spatial abilities (which are crucially relevant for cognitive–motor integration) emerge later in development than simple goal‐directed reaching abilities (Lubans, Morgan, Cliff, Barnett, & Okely, 2010; Paus, 2005), possibly leading to faster CMI performance recovery in adolescents than in younger children. There are also sex‐related differences in eye–hand coordination development and performance (Albines, Granek, Gorbet, & Sergio, 2016; Gorbet & Sergio, 2007), which may lead to different CMI recovery times between girls and boys. Therefore, in the present study, we examine factors that may influence the recovery of CMI performance in youth with a history of concussion, such as age, sex, number of concussions, and years of sport experience in eye–limb coordination sports.…”

Assessment of a Cognitive-Motor Training Program in Adults at Risk for Developing Dementia

“…(33)(34)(35) Thus, while the current study's effects are subtle, we believe these data indirectly support the idea that this type of activity (controlled visuomotor exercises that integrate explicit an implicit cognitive rules for successful performance) is useful for augmenting functional brain networks shown to be impaired in those at risk for developing dementia. (5,(15)(16)(17)(18) It is important to note that previous work on bimanual coordination has found a large sex-related difference in performance on these types of tasks (30,(36)(37) and differences in visuomotor control more generally. (38)(39)(40) While there was an overall difference in male to female ratio for our participants, we do not believe that the improvements we observed here were driven solely by the "female advantage" for bimanual tasks, since the only group to show improvement was the atrisk training group (1:4 male:female ratio) and not the healthy training group (6:6 male:female ratio) nor the no-training groups.…”

“…The Bimanual Coordination Task (30) is a timed task that involves switching between left and right hands to serially pick up a lever and move a washer onto a peg (see Figure 3).…”

Development of rule-based eye-hand-decoupling in children and adolescents

“…In addition, on an explanatory basis and based on the results shown in Figure 2 and existing literature of eye-hand coordination development in youth (e.g. (Albines, Granek, Gorbet, & Sergio, 2016), we examined the time course of Direct interaction and Eye-hand-decoupled development across Young children (8-10 years), Children (11-12 years), and Adolescents (13-15 years). For all dependent measures (cf., above), effects of group (Young children, Children, Adolescents) and condition (Direct, Eye-hand-decoupled) were analyzed using a repeatedmeasures mixed ANOVA, with group (Young children, Children, Adolescents) as a between-subjects factor and condition (Direct, Decoupled) as a within-subjects factor.…”