Department of Experimental and Clinical Medicine, Physiological Sciences Section, University of Florence, Florence, Italy.
Percept Mot Skills. 2021 Apr;128(2):605-624. doi: 10.1177/0031512521990358. Epub 2021 Jan 26.
Adequately quantifying fine motor control is imperative for understanding individual motor behavior development and mastery. We recently showed that using different tasks to evaluate fine motor control may produce different results, suggesting that multiple measures for fine motor control may be evaluating different skills and/or underlying processes. Specifically, drawing behavior may depend on internal cueing, whereas tracing depends more on external cueing. To better understand how an individual develops a certain preference for cueing, we evaluated fine motor control in 265 typically developing children (aged 6-11) by measuring their accuracy for both drawing and tracing a circle. Our results first confirmed that there was no significant correlation between tracing and drawing task performances during this phase of development and, secondly, showed a significant developmental improvement in tracing, especially between 2nd and 3rd graders, whereas drawing ability improved only moderately. We discuss the potential roles of attentional focus and cognitive development as possible influencing factors for these developmental patterns. We conclude that using both a drawing and tracing task to evaluate fine motor control is rapid, economic and valuable for monitoring motor development among elementary school children.
充分量化精细运动控制对于理解个体运动行为的发展和掌握至关重要。我们最近表明，使用不同的任务来评估精细运动控制可能会产生不同的结果，这表明精细运动控制的多种测量方法可能在评估不同的技能和/或潜在过程。具体来说，绘图行为可能取决于内部提示，而追踪则更多地依赖于外部提示。为了更好地理解个体如何发展出对提示的特定偏好，我们通过测量 265 名典型发展儿童（6-11 岁）在绘制和追踪圆形方面的准确性，来评估精细运动控制。我们的结果首先证实，在这个发展阶段，追踪和绘图任务的表现之间没有显著的相关性，其次，追踪的发展有显著的提高，特别是在 2 年级和 3 年级之间，而绘图能力只是适度提高。我们讨论了注意力焦点和认知发展作为这些发展模式的可能影响因素的潜在作用。我们得出的结论是，使用绘图和追踪任务来评估精细运动控制是快速、经济的，并且对于监测小学生的运动发展具有重要价值。
