Visuomanual coordination in childhood: adaptation to visual distortion

Abstract

The aim of the experiment was to study the adaptive capacities of children to perform drawing movements while being visually perturbed. Children aged 5-11 years and a group of adults drew diamonds via information provided through a computer screen. The screen display was either upright or rotated 180 degrees. Results showed that the absence of direct vision of the hand yielded more perturbation in the youngest group of children compared to all other groups. In spite of some initial difficulty, all children reached accurate control after five trials. When faced with spatial rotations of the visual field, youngsters were again more perturbed than others. All children showed the same rate of adaptation to visual rotations, but they differed on adaptive strategies. Five- and 7-year-olds shifted to a feedforward mode of control consisting of the production of a rapid gesture, followed by error evaluation in order to correct their next movement. Older children were characterised by a progressive integration of reafferent visual and proprioceptive information. It resulted in an increase in duration of strokes and reduced speed, meaning enhanced on-line retrieval of information. However, 9-year-old children experienced more difficulty recuperating sensory information during movement than 11-year-olds, and kept using error feedback. Finally, visuomanual coordination in children aged 11 years, while slightly differing from that of adults, was not yet totally mature.

Short-term plasticity in children's speech motor systems

“…This hypothesis was motivated by earlier work in limb motor control showing short-term changes in children's movement proficiency with practice (Deutsch & Newell, 2002, 2004Engelhorn, 1988;Ferrel-Chapus et al, 2002;Konczak et al, 2003;Lazarus et al, 1995;Manoel & Connolly, 1995;Takahashi et al, 2003;Thomas et al, 2000). In the current study, the coordinative patterns for nonword production changed over the course of 10 trials for the 9 and 10-year-old participants, suggesting that the children's motor control processes were adaptively changing to improve performance.…”

“…They argued that practice and the utilization of feedback allow children to reduce variability and adapt to task requirements. Although children may be more variable initially than adults on motor tasks, they are able to adapt their motor performance and become more accurate and faster within a short period of time (i.e., within an experimental session) on goal directed arm and hand movements (Engelhorn, 1988;Manoel & Connolly, 1995;, on an isometric force tracking task (Lazarus, Whitall, & Franks, 1995), when required to adapt to an externally applied limb perturbation (Konczak et al, 2003;Takahashi et al, 2003), and to visual perturbation during a drawing task (Ferrel-Chapus, Hay, Olivier, Bard, & Fleury, 2002). These changes in movement proficiency that occur in the short-term cannot be accounted for by decrements in system noise due to physiological constraints, as these would be expected to change gradually over the course of development (Takahashi et al, 2003).…”

Multiple representations and mechanisms for visuomotor adaptation in young children

“…For example, the behavior of children 4-6 yrs of age was perturbed by spatial transformations, such as a vertical display instead of an aligned display, which induced more planning variability in children than in adults (Bo, Contreras-Vidal, Kagerer, & Clark, 2006). Moreover, when confronted with a 180°rotation of a visual scene, 5-yrold children were more highly affected than either older children or adults, and they showed difficulty integrating visual and proprioceptive information (Ferrel-Chapus, Hay, Olivier, Bard, & Fleury, 2002). This difference in adaptation may result from the fact that 5-yr-old children do not re-align map visual and motor spaces in the same way that adults do.…”

Evidence for Multisensory Spatial-to-Motor Transformations in Aiming Movements of Children

“…With practice, participants are able to adapt to the perturbation by updating a spatial-tomotor transformation that is appropriate for the novel visuomotor environment (Kagerer et al 1997;Krakauer et al 2000). Although these visuomotor paradigms have been extended to investigate age-related differences in school-aged children (Bo et al 2006;Contreras-Vidal et al 2005;Ferrel-Chapus et al 2002), existing developmental research has yet to explore the multisensory properties of these spatial-to-motor transformations. Specifically, it is unknown whether children use shared spatial-to-motor transformations for movements toward targets perceived by different sensory modalities (i.e., both vision and audition).…”