ICTEAM, Université catholique de Louvain, Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium.
J Neurophysiol. 2013 Jul;110(2):358-67. doi: 10.1152/jn.00981.2012. Epub 2013 Apr 24.
Motor skills improve with age from childhood into adulthood, and this improvement is reflected in the performance of smooth pursuit eye movements. In contrast, the saccadic system becomes mature earlier than the smooth pursuit system. Therefore, the present study investigates whether the early mature saccadic system compensates for the lower pursuit performance during childhood. To answer this question, horizontal eye movements were recorded in 58 children (ages 5-16 yr) and 16 adults (ages 23-36 yr) in a task that required the combination of smooth pursuit and saccadic eye movements. Smooth pursuit performance improved with age. However, children had larger average position error during target tracking compared with adults, but they did not execute more saccades to compensate for their low pursuit performance despite the early maturity of their saccadic system. This absence of error correction suggests that children have a lower sensitivity to visual errors compared with adults. This reduced sensitivity might stem from poor internal models and longer processing time in young children.
从儿童期到成年期，运动技能会随着年龄的增长而提高，这种提高反映在平滑追踪眼球运动的表现上。相比之下，扫视系统比平滑追踪系统更早成熟。因此，本研究探讨了早期成熟的扫视系统是否可以弥补儿童时期较低的追踪表现。为了回答这个问题，在一项需要平滑追踪和扫视眼球运动相结合的任务中，记录了 58 名儿童（年龄 5-16 岁）和 16 名成年人（年龄 23-36 岁）的水平眼球运动。平滑追踪表现随着年龄的增长而提高。然而，与成年人相比，儿童在目标跟踪过程中的平均位置误差更大，但他们并没有通过更多的扫视来弥补自己较低的追踪表现，尽管他们的扫视系统已经提前成熟。这种缺乏误差修正的情况表明，与成年人相比，儿童对视觉误差的敏感性较低。这种较低的敏感性可能源于年幼儿童较差的内部模型和更长的处理时间。
