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Updated: Jul 19, 2026
Efficiently Recording the Eye-Hand Coordination to Incoordination Spectrum
Published on: March 21, 2019
Problems in the coupling of eye and hand in the sequential movements of children with Developmental Coordination
K Wilmut1, J P Wann, J H Brown
1Department of Psychology, University of Reading, Reading, UK. k.wilmut@reading.ac.uk
Insights
Children with Developmental Coordination Disorder (DCD) struggle with sequential eye-hand movements, often delaying hand actions after gaze fixation. This look-then-move strategy increases errors in complex tasks.
Area of Science:
- Neuroscience
- Developmental Psychology
- Motor Control
Background:
- Skilled manual actions naturally involve anticipatory gaze shifts.
- Eye-hand coordination in Developmental Coordination Disorder (DCD) is understudied.
Purpose of the Study:
- To assess eye-hand coordination maturity in children with DCD.
- Investigate the coupling of eye and hand movements during sequential tasks in 7-year-old children.
Main Methods:
- Utilized a double-step pointing task with simultaneous eye and hand movement recording.
- Compared typically developing (TD) children with children diagnosed with DCD.
Main Results:
- No group differences in fast single-target tasks.
- Children with DCD showed delayed hand movements after gaze fixation in sequential tasks.
- This delay increased eye-hand lead, disrupting coupling and reducing accuracy.
Conclusions:
- Children with DCD, unlike TD peers, maintained a 'look-then-move' strategy, hindering feedforward control.
- Difficulties lie in concatenating sequential gaze and hand shifts, not simple movement speed or accuracy.
- This impacts performance in everyday tasks requiring coordinated movements.
Background:
Shifting gaze and attention ahead of the hand is a natural component in the performance of skilled manual actions. Very few studies have examined the precise co-ordination between the eye and hand in children with Developmental Coordination Disorder (DCD).
Methods:
This study directly assessed the maturity of eye-hand co-ordination in children with DCD. A double-step pointing task was used to investigate the coupling of the eye and hand in 7-year-old children with and without DCD. Sequential targets were presented on a computer screen, and eye and hand movements were recorded simultaneously.
Results:
There were no differences between typically developing (TD) and DCD groups when completing fast single-target tasks. There were very few differences in the completion of the first movement in the double-step tasks, but differences did occur during the second sequential movement. One factor appeared to be the propensity for the DCD children to delay their hand movement until some period after the eye had landed on the target. This resulted in a marked increase in eye-hand lead during the second movement, disrupting the close coupling and leading to a slower and less accurate hand movement among children with DCD.
Conclusions:
In contrast to skilled adults, both groups of children preferred to foveate the target prior to initiating a hand movement if time allowed. The TD children, however, were more able to reduce this foveation period and shift towards a feedforward mode of control for hand movements. The children with DCD persevered with a look-then-move strategy, which led to an increase in error. For the group of DCD children in this study, there was no evidence of a problem in speed or accuracy of simple movements, but there was a difficulty in concatenating the sequential shifts of gaze and hand required for the completion of everyday tasks or typical assessment items.
