Department of Psychology, University of Turin.
Department of Biomedical Technology, Found. Don Carlo Gnocchi IRCCS.
Dev Psychol. 2014 Apr;50(4):1073-80. doi: 10.1037/a0034482. Epub 2013 Sep 23.
Movements with both hands are essential to our everyday life, and it has been shown that performing asymmetric bimanual movements produces an interference effect between hands. There have been many studies--using varying methods--investigating the development of bimanual movements that show that this skill continues to evolve during childhood and adolescence. In the current study we used a spatial bimanual task to delineate the development of bimanual movements not only during different stages of childhood but also during late stages of adulthood. Furthermore, we used the same task as a window to observe the involvement of motor imagery through the same age groups. For this study we recruited participants from 4 different age groups and asked them to perform congruent and noncongruent bimanual movements in a Real condition, where participants moved both hands, and in an Imagery condition, where they had to imagine 1 hand's movements while actually using the other hand. Our results showed that, with actual movement execution, the interference between motor programs of the 2 hands is higher in children (6-10 years old) than in younger adults (20-30 years old), while it tends to increase again in the elderly adults (60-80 years old). Interestingly, in the Imagery condition, the interference was present only among 10-year-old and 20- to 30-year-old participants, suggesting that motor imagery, not yet developed in young children and compromised by age in the elderly subjects, did not modulate motor performance in these last 2 groups.
双手运动对我们的日常生活至关重要，已经表明执行不对称双手运动在双手之间产生干扰效应。有许多研究——使用不同的方法——研究了双手运动的发展，表明这项技能在儿童和青少年时期仍在不断发展。在目前的研究中，我们使用空间双手任务来描绘双手运动的发展，不仅在儿童的不同阶段，而且在成年后期。此外，我们使用相同的任务作为一个窗口，通过相同的年龄组观察运动意象的参与。在这项研究中，我们从 4 个不同的年龄组招募了参与者，并要求他们在真实条件下执行一致和不一致的双手运动，在真实条件下，参与者移动双手，在想象条件下，他们必须想象一只手的运动，而实际上使用另一只手。我们的结果表明，在用实际运动执行时，两只手的运动程序之间的干扰在儿童（6-10 岁）中高于年轻成年人（20-30 岁），而在老年成年人（60-80 岁）中又趋于增加。有趣的是，在想象条件下，干扰仅存在于 10 岁和 20-30 岁的参与者中，这表明运动意象在幼儿中尚未发展，在老年参与者中因年龄而受损，在最后 2 组中并未调节运动表现。
