Effects of varying post-KR intervals upon children' motor performance

An experiment using post-KR interval methodology was designed to investigate the developmental relationship of age and processing speed regarding performance on a ballistic linear slide task. The hypothesis drawn from the developmental literature was that, given a short time for processing information, younger children should perform less efficiently than older children and adults. However, an increase in processing time should result in performances being more similar. Subjects in the experiment were 90 female children equally divided among 7 and 11-yr-olds and adults. Within age, subjects were randomly assigned to one of three post-KR interval groups: 3, 6, and 12 sec. Conclusions support the processing deficits hypotheses of Chi (1976): given enough time to process KR, the children's performance was not significantly different from the performance of adults.