Examining developmental changes in children’s motor imagery: A longitudinal study (original) (raw)
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Predictive models to determine imagery strategies employed by children to judge hand laterality.
A commonly used paradigm to study motor imagery is the hand laterality judgment task. The present study aimed to determine which strategies young children employ to successfully perform this task. Children of 5 to 8 years old (N = 92) judged laterality of back and palm view hand pictures in different rotation angles. Response accuracy and response duration were registered. Response durations of the trials with a correct judgment were fitted to a-priori defined predictive sinusoid models, representing different strategies to successfully perform the hand laterality judgment task. The first model predicted systematic changes in response duration as a function of rotation angle of the displayed hand. The second model predicted that response durations are affected by biomechanical constraints of hand rotation. If observed data could be best described by the first model, this would argue for a mental imagery strategy that does not involve motor processes to solve the task. The second model reflects a motor imagery strategy to solve the task. In line with previous research, we showed an age-related increase in response accuracy and decrease in response duration in children. Observed data for both back and palm view showed that motor imagery strategies were used to perform hand laterality judgments, but that not all the children use these strategies (appropriately) at all times. A direct comparison of response duration patterns across age sheds new light on age-related differences in the strategies employed to solve the task. Importantly, the employment of the motor imagery strategy for successful task performance did not change with age.
Current insights in the development of children’s motor imagery ability.
Over the last two decades, the number of studies on motor imagery in children has witnessed a large expansion. Most studies used the hand laterality judgment paradigm or the mental chronometry paradigm to examine motor imagery ability. The main objective of the current review is to collate these studies to provide a more comprehensive insight in children's motor imagery development and its age of onset.
Human Movement Science, 2013
The purpose of this study was to chart the development of motor imagery ability between 5 and 29 years of age and its relationship to fine-motor skill. 237 participants performed a computerized Virtual Radial Fitts Task (VRFT) as a measure of Motor Imagery (MI) ability. Participants aimed at five targets, positioned along radial axes from a central target circle. The targets differed in width over trials (2.5, 5, 10, 20 or 40 mm). Performance was indexed by the relationship between the movement time (MT) in executed and imagined movements. A subset of participants (11-19 years old, n = 22) also performed the task with their non-preferred hand. We also examined if manual skill (measured by peg board task and posting coins) was related to the executed and imagined MT on the VRFT. Our results showed that the accuracy of the imagined movement improved steadily over childhood, reaching an asymptote during adolescence and into early adulthood. The correlation between the real and virtual MT using the preferred hand did not differ appreciably from that using the non-preferred hand. If the children could perform the tasks with their non-preferred hand (11 years and older), they also scaled performance in relatively precise terms using the less dextrous non-preferred hand. The correlation between real MT on the VRFT and fine-motor performance ranged between .53 and .42, while that for virtual movement was between .37 and .34. MI ability predicts manual skill to a moderate degree.
Developmental changes of the biomechanical effect in motor imagery
Experimental Brain Research, 2013
Motor imagery has been investigated in childhood and early adolescence, but not across adolescence stages; moreover, available evidence did not clarify whether the involvement of motor information in mental rotation of body parts becomes stronger or weaker during development. In the present study, we employed the hand laterality task to assess motor imagery in ninety-seven typically developing adolescents divided into three age groups (i.e., 11-12, 14-15, and 17-18 years); mental rotation of objects and letters were also assessed. as a specific marker of the motor involvement in mental rotation of body parts, we assessed the so-called biomechanical effect, that is, the advantage for judging hand pictures showing physically comfortable positions with respect to hand pictures showing physically impossible or awkward positions. Results demonstrated that the biomechanical effect did not significantly affect early adolescents' performance, whereas it became significant in 14-to 15-year-old participants and even more stronger in 17-to 18-year-old participants; this pattern did not depend on an increase in processing speed to mentally rotate both corporeal and non-corporeal (objects and letters) stimuli. the present findings demonstrated that: (1) motor imagery undergoes a continuous and progressive refinement throughout adolescence, and (2) full exploitation of motor information to mentally transform corporeal stimuli can be attained in late adolescence only.
Age-related changes in Motor Imagery from early childhood to adulthood
The purpose of this study was to chart the development of motor imagery ability between 5 and 29 years of age and its relationship to fine-motor skill. 237 participants performed a computerized Virtual Radial Fitts Task (VRFT) as a measure of Motor Imagery (MI) ability. Participants aimed at five targets, positioned along radial axes from a central target circle. The targets differed in width over trials (2.5, 5, 10, 20 or 40 mm). Performance was indexed by the relationship between the movement time (MT) in executed and imagined movements. A subset of participants (11-19 years old, n = 22) also performed the task with their non-preferred hand. We also examined if manual skill (measured by peg board task and posting coins) was related to the executed and imagined MT on the VRFT. Our results showed that the accuracy of the imagined movement improved steadily over childhood, reaching an asymptote during adolescence and into early adulthood. The correlation between the real and virtual MT using the preferred hand did not differ appreciably from that using the non-preferred hand. If the children could perform the tasks with their non-preferred hand (11 years and older), they also scaled performance in relatively precise terms using the less dextrous non-preferred hand. The correlation between real MT on the VRFT and fine-motor performance ranged between .53 and .42, while that for virtual movement was between .37 and .34. MI ability predicts manual skill to a moderate degree.
Motor processes in children's imagery: the case of mental rotation of hands
Developmental Science, 2005
In a mental rotation task, children 5 and 6 years of age and adults had to decide as quickly as possible if a photograph of a hand showed a left or a right limb. The visually presented hands were left and right hands in palm or in back view, presented in four different angles of rotation. Participants had to give their responses with their own hands either in a regular, palms-down posture or in an inverted, palms-up posture. For both children and adults, variation of the posture of their own hand had a significant effect. Reaction times were longer the more awkward it was to bring their own hand into the position shown in the stimulus photograph. These results, together with other converging evidence, strongly suggest that young children's kinetic imagery is guided by motor processes, even more so than adults'.
The ability of 6- to 8-year-old children to use motor imagery in a goal-directed pointing task
It has been suggested that motor imagery ability develops gradually between 5 and 12 years of age, but ambiguity remains over the precise developmental course before 9 years. Hence, we determined the age-related differences in the use of motor imagery by children on the mental chronometry paradigm. In addition, we examined whether the use of motor imagery is related to cognitive and hand abilities. To this end, we compared duration of actual pointing and imagined pointing on a radial Fitts' task in 82 children (three age groups; 6-, 7-, and 8-year-olds). In line with previous studies, we found an age-related increase in temporal congruence between actual and imagined pointing and compliance with Fitts' law. Importantly, however, we showed that only a limited number of 7-and 8-year-olds were actually using motor imagery to perform the imagined pointing task, whereas the 6-year-olds did not employ motor imagery to perform the task. The current results extend previous research by establishing that the age of onset to use motor imagery in the mental chronometry paradigm is not prior to 7 years.
Mental Representation of Arm Motion Dynamics in Children and Adolescents
PLoS ONE, 2013
Motor imagery, i.e., a mental state during which an individual internally represents an action without any overt motor output, is a potential tool to investigate action representation during development. Here, we took advantage of the inertial anisotropy phenomenon to investigate whether children can generate accurate motor predictions for movements with varying dynamics. Children (9 and 11 years), adolescents (14 years) and young adults (21 years) carried-out actual and mental arm movements in two different directions in the horizontal plane: rightwards (low inertia) and leftwards (high inertia). We recorded and compared actual and mental movement times. We found that actual movement times were greater for leftward than rightward arm movements in all groups. For mental movements, differences between leftward versus rightward movements were observed in the adults and adolescents, but not among the children. Furthermore, significant differences between actual and mental times were found at 9 and 11 years of age in the leftward direction. The ratio R/L (rightward direction/leftward direction), which indicates temporal differences between low inertia and high inertia movements, was inferior to 1 at all ages, except for the mental movements at 9 years of age, indicating than actual and mental movements were shorter for the rightward than leftward direction. Interestingly, while the ratio R/L of actual movements was constant across ages, it gradually decreased with age for mental movements. The ratio A/M (actual movement/mental movement), which indicates temporal differences between actual and mental movements, was near to 1 in the adults' groups, denoting accurate mental timing. In children and adolescents, an underestimation of mental movement times appeared for the leftward movements only. However, this overestimation gradually decreased with age. Our results showed a refinement in the motor imagery ability during development. Action representation reached maturation at adolescence, during which mental actions were tightly related to their actual production.
Advances in Cognitive Psychology, 2021
Functional equivalence hypothesis and motor-cognitive model both posit that motor imagery performance involves inhibition of overt physical movement and thus engages control processes. As motor inhibition in internal motor imagery has been fairly well studied in adults, the present study aimed to investigate the correlation between internal motor imagery and motor inhibition in children. A total of 73 children (7-year-olds: 23, 9-year-olds: 27, and 11-year-olds: 23) participated the study. Motor inhibition was assessed with a stop-signal task, and motor imagery abilities were measured with a hand laterality judgment task and an alphanumeric rotation task, respectively. Overall, for all age groups, response time in both motor imagery tasks increased with rotation angles. Moreover, all children's response times in both tasks decreased with age, their accuracy increased with age, and their motor inhibition efficiency increased with age. We found a significant difference between 7-year-olds and 9-year-olds in the hand laterality judgment task, suggesting that the involvement of motor inhibition in internal motor imagery might change with age. Our results reveal the underlying processes of internal motor imagery development, and furthermore, provide practical implications for movement rehabilitation of children.