title: No Interrelation of Motor Planning and Executive Functions across Young Ages.
abstract: The present study examined the developmental trajectories of motor planning and executive functioning in children. To this end, we tested 217 participants with three motor tasks, measuring anticipatory planning abilities (i.e., the bar-transport-task, the sword-rotation-task and the grasp-height-task), and three cognitive tasks, measuring executive functions (i.e., the Tower-of-Hanoi-task, the Mosaic-task, and the D2-attention-endurance-task). Children were aged between 3 and 10 years and were separated into age groups by 1-year bins, resulting in a total of eight groups of children and an additional group of adults. Results suggested (1) a positive developmental trajectory for each of the sub-tests, with better task performance as children get older; (2) that the performance in the separate tasks was not correlated across participants in the different age groups; and (3) that there was no relationship between performance in the motor tasks and in the cognitive tasks used in the present study when controlling for age. These results suggest that both, motor planning and executive functions are rather heterogeneous domains of cognitive functioning with fewer interdependencies than often suggested.
authors.affiliation: Institute of Sport and Sport Science, University of Freiburg Freiburg, Germany.
authors.forename: Kathrin
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Wunsch
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, University of Würzburg Würzburg, Germany.
authors.forename: Roland
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Pfister
authors.affiliation: Developmental Psychology, SRH Fachhochschule for Healthcare Gera, Germany.
authors.forename: Anne
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Henning
authors.affiliation: Developmental Psychology, Saarland University Saarbrücken, Germany.
authors.forename: Gisa
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Aschersleben
authors.affiliation: Department Sport and Health, University of Paderborn Paderborn, Germany.
authors.forename: Matthias
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Weigelt
keywords: anticipatory planning; child development; developmental disorders; end-state comfort effect; motor development