Development of interactions between sensorimotor representations in school-aged children

Abstract

Reliable sensory-motor integration is a pre-requisite for optimal movement control; the functionality of this integration changes during development. Previous research has shown that motor performance of school-age children is characterized by higher variability, particularly under conditions where vision is not available, and movement planning and control is largely based on kinesthetic input. The purpose of the current study was to determine the characteristics of how kinesthetic-motor internal representations interact with visuo-motor representations during development. To this end, we induced a visuo-motor adaptation in 59 children, ranging from 5 to 12 years of age, as well as in a group of adults, and measured initial directional error (IDE) and endpoint error (EPE) during a subsequent condition where visual feedback was not available, and participants had to rely on kinesthetic input. Our results show that older children (age range 9-12 years) de-adapted significantly more than younger children (age range 5-8 years) over the course of 36 trials in the absence of vision, suggesting that the kinesthetic-motor internal representation in the older children was utilized more efficiently to guide hand movements, and was comparable to the performance of the adults.

Development of kinesthetic-motor and auditory-motor representations in school-aged children

“…In older children, this integration of both processes operated more efficiently and enabled them to become more accurate again. This increasing efficiency in applying a particular control mode might also contribute to kinesthetic-motor representations that are more ‘robust’ against perturbations, as we have shown in a previous study (Kagerer and Clark 2014b). In this context, the high IDESD scores for movements to the ipsilateral target could be seen as performance degradation, compared to the lower variability for movements to the contralateral target in the 7- to 8- and 9- to 10-year-olds.…”

“…Using a perturbation paradigm in a recent study in 5- to 12-year-old children, we showed that kinesthetically guided movements following a visuo-motor perturbation were less affected in the older children than in the younger ones, suggesting a visual-to-kinesthetic mapping that, with increasing age, becomes more robust against interference from adaptive processes in other sensorimotor maps (Kagerer and Clark 2014a). That study informed us primarily about the response to a perturbation across modalities, but less about the quality of the ‘raw’ kinesthetic-motor integration.…”

Neural predictors of motor control and impact of visuo‐proprioceptive information in youth

“…King et al [] additionally showed that the relative contribution of proprioception to the multisensory target estimate was smaller in younger children compared with older children, suggesting superiority of visual over proprioceptive accuracy in the younger children. These findings were supported by the work of Kagerer and Clark [], showing that younger children aged 5–6 years did not use proprioceptive information as efficiently as older children aged 7–15 years. In their study, children were required to perform unimanual goal‐directed movements from visually presented start positions towards target positions.…”

“…However, the relative contribution of these different systems is not equal [Goble and Brown, ]. In children, visual information has been shown to contribute more than proprioceptive information to joint position sense [Gomez‐Moya et al, ; Kagerer and Clark, ]. More specifically, King et al [] tested children aged 7–13 years in goal‐directed unimanual movements.…”

Crossmodal interference in bimanual movements: effects of abrupt visuo-motor perturbation of one hand on the other

“…The purpose of this study was to address this knowledge gap and determine the nature of interactions during bimanual coordination across modalities, using a setting in which there are conflicting signals between the kinesthetic-motor mapping of one hand, and the visuo-motor mapping of the simultaneously moving contralateral hand. A recent unimanual study exposing the same hand to a visuomotor rotation, followed by a condition without visual feedback requiring kinesthetic-motor control, indicated a more robust kinesthetic-motor mapping in adults than in young children, which in turn suggests consolidation of the mapping with increasing age (Kagerer and Clark 2014). Using a bimanual setup, I now examined how robust the kinesthetic-motor mapping of one arm is against interference from the contralateral limb, which is in the process of updating its visuo-motor mapping.…”