title: Acquisition of visuomanual skills and improvement of information processing capacities in 6- to 10-year-old children performing a 2D pointing task.
abstract: The aim of this study was to investigate motor performance and visuomanual control through the analysis of Fitts' law in 6-, 8-, and 10-year-old children and adults performing a constrained two-dimensional pointing task. Participants were required to point and click on targets appearing on a laptop computer screen with a standard computer mouse. Three sizes of targets were used to create different indexes of difficulty. Analysis first showed linear visuomanual abilities to perform bi-dimensional pointing movements. It appears that developmental motor performance changes are due to combined enhanced programming processes and online feedback processing. Immature visuomanual control of 10-year-old children could be explained by higher cognitive requirements related to the task. As predicted by Fitts' law, movement time linearly decreases with the enlargement of target width. Moreover, a regression analysis of movement time on index of difficulty (ID) clearly showed significant differences for cognitive processing capacities with age: increasing ID effects are more dramatic in younger children performing computer mouse pointing movements.
authors.affiliation: Centre for Interdisciplinary Research in Rehabilitation and Social Integration (CIRRIS), Faculty of Medicine, Laval University, 525 Wilfrid-Hamel Blvd, Aile McCowell, Quebec, G1M 2S8, Canada. julie.lambert@irdpq.qc.ca
authors.forename: Julie
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Lambert
authors.forename: Chantal
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Bard
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D000704:Analysis of Variance; D002648:Child; D005385:Fingers / Q000254:growth & development / Q000502:physiology*; D006801:Humans; D009039:Motion Perception / Q000502:physiology*; D009068:Movement / Q000502:physiology*; D010775:Photic Stimulation / Q000379:methods*; D011597:Psychomotor Performance / Q000502:physiology*; D011930:Reaction Time / Q000502:physiology