Typical Development of Finger Position Sense From Late Childhood to Adolescence

Finger position sense is a proprioceptive modality highly important for fine motor control. Its developmental time course is largely unknown. This cross-sectional study examined its typical development in 138 children (8-17 years) and a group of 14 healthy young adults using a fast and novel psychophysical test that yielded objective measures of position sense acuity. Participants placed their hands underneath a computer tablet and judged the perceived position of their unseen index finger relative to two visible areas displayed on a tablet following a two-forced-choice paradigm. Responses were fitted to a psychometric acuity function from which the difference between the point-of-subjective-equality and the veridical finger position (ΔPSE) was derived as a measure of position sense bias, and the uncertainty area (UA) as a measure of precision. The main results are: First, children under 12 exhibited a significantly greater UA than adults while adolescent children (13-17 years) exhibited no significant differences when compared to adults. Second, no significant age-related differences in ΔPSE were found across the age range of 8-17 years. This implies that the typical development of finger position sense from late childhood to adulthood is characterized as an age-dependent increase in proprioceptive precision and not as a decrease in bias.