The present study deals with the influence of specific motor experiences on efficient grasp planning. Forty 5- to 6-year-old children learned to use an unfamiliar tool with either a thumb-up or a thumb-down grip to accomplish a task. Before and after training, the extent to which children would rotate the tool using an awkward initial grip…

Spatial play in early childhood is associated with a variety of spatial and cognitive skills. However, these associations are often derived from studies in which different tasks are used across different age ranges, leaving open the question of how children's natural behaviors during spatial play develop from infancy into the early preschool…

Fine motor skills develop in childhood. In this study, we evaluate motor planning in 6- to 11-year-old children using a pegboard and midline crossing task. The results of the pegboard task showed that children modified their strategies of hand use and space use as a function of age, albeit with a transition in the 8- to 9-year-old children. The…

Physical activity--including outdoor motor play--has been associated with learning and brain-related functions and abilities in elementary school children and adolescence. Few studies have been conducted on the relationships between active play and these cognitive processes in preschool aged children. Several investigations have revealed that…

We examined the developmental differences in motor control and learning of a two-segment movement. One hundred and five participants (53 female) were divided into three age groups (7-8 years, 9-10 years and 19-27 years). They performed a two-segment movement task in four conditions (full vision, fully disturbed vision, disturbed vision in the…

In executing purposeful actions, adults select sufficient and necessary limbs. But infants often move goal-irrelevant limbs, suggesting a developmental process of motor specialization. Two experiments with 9- and 12-month-olds revealed gradual decreases in extraneous movements in non-acting limbs during unimanual actions. In Experiment 1,…

This study examined early development of cool and hot self-regulation and how they were related to Chinese preschoolers' early achievement. A total of 951 children (448 girls) aged three to five in Hong Kong participated in this study. Children's self-regulation was assessed with a battery of five tasks tapping either cool or hot self-regulation;…

Adult humans process communicative interactions by recognizing that information is being communicated through speech (linguistic ability) and simultaneously evaluating how to respond appropriately (social-pragmatic ability). These abilities may originate in infancy. Infants understand how speech communicates in social interactions, helping them…

Manual dexterity is known to gradually progress with developmental age. In this study, we evaluate the performance of unimanual and bimanual actions under perturbed and unperturbed conditions in children between 4 and 10 years of age. Behavior was assessed by means of trajectory measurements and degree of bimanual coupling. The results showed that…

Purpose: To examine whether children with specific language impairment (SLI) differ from normally developing peers in motor skills, especially those skills related to timing. Method: Standard measures of gross and fine motor development were obtained. Furthermore, finger and hand movements were recorded while children engaged in 4 different timing…

The authors examined the relation between infants' motor skills and attention to objects features in events in which a hand acted on an object (e.g., squeezed it) that then produced a sound (e.g., squeaking). In this study, 6- to 7-month-old infants (N = 41) were habituated to a single event and then tested with changes in appearance and action.…

Task Analysis is both a testing device that assesses the developmental status and progress of children and an instructional approach that takes into account the sequential development of skillfulness in young children. In assessing the motor developmental status of children task analysis is concerned with isolating and defining important…

Two studies on cognitive performance in mentally retarded children are reported. In the first study, the Bayley Scales of Infant Development were administered to 56 mentally retarded children, aged 2 to 6, to determine the possibility of discerning subsets of items that form a developmental pattern of interrelated subscales, using the SCAMMO scale…

The purpose of the study was to determine whether particular aspects of movement control influenced the performance of 2-year-old children on a standard developmental test, and thus influenced assessments of intellectual progress based on that test. Six cerebral-palsied (CP) children were compared with six children not suffering motor system…