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Published on: January 11, 2016
Developmental aspects of pluriarticular movement control
Isabelle Mackrous1, Luc Proteau
1Département de kinésiologie, Université de Montréal, Montreal, Canada. isamackrous@hotmail.com
Insights
Children’s out-and-back movement control improves with age, especially for movements away from the body. Visual feedback plays a minor role in interjoint coordination when proprioception is intact.
Area of Science:
- Motor Control
- Developmental Neuroscience
- Biomechanics
Background:
- Precise control of multi-joint (pluriarticular) movements is essential for smooth, accurate motion.
- Understanding the developmental trajectory of motor control in children is crucial for identifying typical and atypical development.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate age-related differences in out-and-back movement accuracy between children and adults.
- To examine the influence of visual feedback on pluriarticular movement control in different age groups.
Main Methods:
- 36 children (6–12 years) and 12 adults performed out-and-back movements under normal vision and target-only conditions.
- Movement accuracy was assessed using reversal angle and overlapping error metrics.
- Proprioception and afferent information roles were inferred.
Main Results:
- Adults demonstrated sharper movement reversal than children, particularly for movements targeting eccentric locations.
- Pluriarticular movement control showed developmental improvement in eccentric workspace regions.
- Visual feedback did not significantly enhance movement reversal, even with errors, suggesting proprioception's dominance.
Conclusions:
- Pluriarticular movement control matures throughout childhood, especially for movements in outer workspace areas.
- Proprioception is more critical than visual feedback for interjoint coordination in intact systems.
- Movement planning may be more stable when relying on dynamic than static sensory information.
Abstract:
Precise pluriarticular movement control is required to perform straight and smooth out-and-back movements. Our goal was to determine whether children perform out-and-back movements as accurately as adults do in the presence and absence of visual feedback. To reach our goal, 36 children aged between 6 and 12 years, and 12 young adults, performed an out-and-back movement in a normal-vision condition and in a target-only condition. Reversal angle and overlapping error were taken to represent the ability of children to control pluriarticular movement. The results showed that adults exhibited sharper movement reversal than the three children groups did, but only for eccentric targets relative to their midline. This suggests that pluriarticular movement control improved across the course of development for eccentric regions of the workspace. Visual feedback did not result in sharper movement reversal even when relatively large errors were noted (eccentric targets in children). This underlines the relatively minor role of visual feedback for interjoint coordination when proprioception is intact. Finally, we observed that directional variability was smaller at the 100-ms mark for the back than for the out portion of the movement, suggesting that movement-planning processes appear less variable when based on dynamic rather than static afferent information.
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