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Second-order motor planning in children: insights from a cup-manipulation-task

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Abstract

The present study examined the development of anticipatory motor planning in an object manipulation task that has been used to successfully demonstrate motor planning in non-human primates (Weiss et al. in Psychol Sci 18:1063–1068, 2007). Seventy-five participants from four different age groups participated in a cup-manipulation task. One group was preschool children (average age of 5.1 years), two groups were primary school children (7.7 and 9.8 years old respectively) and the final group was comprised of adults. The experimental task entailed reaching for a plastic cup that was vertically suspended in an apparatus in either upright or inverted orientation, removing the cup by its stem and then retrieving a small toy from the inside of the cup. When the cup was inverted in the apparatus, evidence for anticipatory motor planning could be achieved by initially gripping the stem using an inverted (thumb-down) grip posture. We found that when the cup was in upright orientation, all participants reached for the cup using an upright grip (i.e. thumb-up posture). However, when the cup was inverted in the apparatus, only adults consistently used an inverted grasping posture, though the percentage of inverted grips among participants did increase with age. These results suggest a protracted development for anticipatory motor planning abilities in children. Surprisingly, the performance of adults on this task more closely resembles the performance of several nonhuman primate species as opposed to children even at approximately 10 years of age. We discuss how morphological constraints on flexibility may help account for these findings.

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Notes

  1. Separating the children to different groups is an important issue, but it is also very challenging, as many discussions between the authors from Germany and the USA have revealed. In this regard, the age at which children transfer from kindergarten into school becomes important. Because the social context in which children spend their daily life is much different at kindergarten and school, we did not want to include a group in which children of both institutions are mixed. Therefore, it was decided to separate the younger two groups into pre-school and primary school children, taking into account that the age bins are a little larger for these groups. However, the data was also analyzed for 2-year bins, which did not provide any different results. That is, the developmental trajectory of ESC planning was similar when parsing the groups into 2-year bins to the data pattern reported in the results section.

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Acknowledgments

This research was supported by NIH Grant R01 HD067250 (D. J. Weiss) and the German Research Foundation Grant DFG EXC 277 “Cognitive Interaction Technology” (CITEC) (M. Weigelt and T. Schack). The authors thank Roland Pfister for his support on the statistics, the two anonymous reviewers for their comments and suggestions on the manuscript, as well as the editor, Wilfried Kunde, for carefully handling the manuscript.

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Correspondence to Kathrin Wunsch.

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Wunsch, K., Weiss, D.J., Schack, T. et al. Second-order motor planning in children: insights from a cup-manipulation-task. Psychological Research 79, 669–677 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00426-014-0596-y

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