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Inter‐ and intrasensory modality matching in children with hand‐eye coordination problems: exploring the developmental lag hypothesis
Author(s) -
Sigmundsson H.,
Ingvaldsen R P.,
Whiting HT A.
Publication year - 1997
Publication title -
developmental medicine and child neurology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.658
H-Index - 143
eISSN - 1469-8749
pISSN - 0012-1622
DOI - 10.1111/j.1469-8749.1997.tb07544.x
Subject(s) - proprioception , eye–hand coordination , psychology , task (project management) , set (abstract data type) , typically developing , developmental psychology , lag , cognitive psychology , neuroscience , computer science , autism , economics , programming language , computer network , management
This study set out to explore the suggestion that the problems experienced by 8‐year‐old children diagnosed as clumsy in the area of hand‐eye coordination (HECP) might be attributed to a developmental lag. The performances of this group of HECP children were compared with those of groups of 5‐year‐old and 8‐year‐old controls without such deficits, when required to carry out a task involving pointing, without vision, to targets located, visually, visually/proprioceptively, or proprioceptively, the dependent variable being the distance error score from the centre of the target. The performances of the HECP children, when vision or vision/proprioception was used to locate the targets, were shown to be inferior to those of the two control groups of children thereby supporting a visual deficit hypothesis. When the targets had to be located proprioceptively, the performance of the HECP children was shown to be similar to that of the 5‐year‐olds, while both groups were inferior to the 8‐year‐olds, thereby supporting a developmental lag hypothesis in proprioceptive terms. However, when the scores for the preferred and non‐preferred hands were analysed separately a marked deterioration in the performances of both the 5‐year‐old controls and the HECP children was observed while the 8Jyear‐old controls were unaffected. While this finding supports a developmental lag explanation of the inferior performances of the HECP children, it was necessary to qualify such an explanation when the within‐group performances using the preferred and non‐preferred hands were compared. Only the HECP children, under the visual/proprioceptive or proprioceptive conditions, showed significant performance differences, in. favour of the preferred hand. This finding was taken as a suggestion that the developmental lag exhibited by the HECP children might have pathological overtones possibly related to the development of the corpus callosum.