Learning a novel task during mid-childhood

Mid-childhood (5- to 10-year of age) is an important developmental period in which action-perception skills acquired during infancy further refine. Previous studies have exclusively focused on movements of the index finger, analyzing performance measures such as movement time and accuracy. We aim to broaden the study of development of reaching in mid-childhood by focusing in addition to the movement of the index finger also on the movements of the joints of the arm. Because we also focus on the joint angle level, we can relate exploratory behavior in the joint angles to the performance improvements of the index finger when learning a novel task. We are therefore able to not only describe changes over learning but we are able to test an underlying process, like exploration, that could explain changes over learning as well as changes over development.

We expect that younger children have a higher learning capacity at the end-effector level, thus they should be faster in learning to handle the visuomotor transformation task than older children.

Participants will be measured once.

No intervention is applied.