The effect of pre-movement delays on pointing accuracy in middle childhood.

In adults, the introduction of a pre-response delay has been shown to affect accuracy in pointing tasks while leaving accuracy in perceptual matching tasks unaffected. Here, we report on the effect of pre-movement delays on pointing accuracy in 6-10-year-old children. Children of this age group are of particular interest as their reliance on visual cues to monitor and correct their reaches appears to change during this period of development. Nineteen children were asked to point to the location of a target light after a delay of 0, 1, 2, or 4 s following target extinction. Performance was measured in two conditions: (i) open-loop, where the child reproduced the target locations in complete darkness, and (ii) with visual feedback, where information about hand position was available. Errors in the direction and in the amplitude of each reaching movement were recorded separately. The results show that temporal delay significantly affects the pointing movements of these children. Accuracy (mean) deteriorated after only 1 s whereas the precision (standard deviation) of the responses deteriorated after 4 s. Errors in amplitude, but not errors in direction, were reduced by the provision of visual feedback. Taken together, the findings suggest that amplitude and directional components of pointing in childhood utilise different sources of information, which differ in the extent to which temporal constraints operate.     

Head and body hemispace to left and right III: Vibrotactile stimulation and sensory and motor components

Response latencies were measured to vibrotactile stimulation delivered to the forefingers of the left or right hands which were positioned ipsilaterally or contralaterally (across the midline) in left or right hemispace. While the two hands did not differ in speed of response, either hand performed better when located in right hemispace (experiment 1). This effect was greatly reduced, though not eliminated, with 90 degrees lateral head turn, when performance was better with stimulation and responding in right-of-head hemispace, but not right-of-body hemispace (experiment 2). When different hands received stimulation and initiated responses, and were located in either the same or opposite hemispace, right-hemispace superiority was found to be motor rather than sensory (experiment 3). These findings are discussed in the context of the true and the phenomenological midline and the clinical syndrome of hemineglect.