Using the Wayne Saccadic Fixator to evaluate aspects of laterality skills in children.

The Wayne Saccadic Fixator has been used to evaluate various performance characteristics of a subject's eye-hand coordination, visual reaction times, peripheral awareness, and saccadic eye movement skills. The purpose of this investigation was twofold: first, to establish standard performance scores for normal achieving children using the Wayne Saccadic Fixator preprogrammed procedure #3. The procedure was structured to compare the scoring ability of a child's dominant and non-dominant hands. The second purpose was to determine if the instrument could be used to identify children who were diagnosed by other testing methods as having laterality/directionality deficits. The data collected indicated that there was a direct relationship between age and scoring ability on this Wayne Saccadic Fixator task. However, both the normal achieving students and the special education children scored equally well when using either their dominant or non-dominant hand. There appeared to be no significant difference in the mean scoring ability of children with a diagnosed laterality deficit and children with normal laterality/directionality skills.