Coordination in childhood: modifications of visuomotor representations in 6-to 11-year-old children

This research investigated the development of visuomotor coordination in childhood, more specifically the conversion of visual information into motor sequences. Three groups of children (aged 6, 8 and 11 years) and a group of adults performed pointing movements without direct feedback from their arm displacements. Visual information, provided by a video camera, was disturbed by rotations of 0 degrees, 45 degrees, 90 degrees, 135 degrees or 180 degrees. Six-year-old children showed poor accuracy for 180 degrees rotations. These results suggest that the youngest children use unidirectional representations to convert visual information into motor sequences. At 8 years of age, children showed a shift from unidirectional to bidirectional representations, as reflected by reduced errors for 180 degrees rotations. Eleven-year-old children and adults showed the same type of representations, i.e., bidirectional. However, as reflected by their slower movement time and slower modifications in temporal accuracy across trials, the oldest children have not yet reached maturation in their adaptive process when compared to adults.