Development of forward models for hand localization and movement control in 6- to 10-year-old children

An active kinesthetic-to-visual matching task was performed by 15 children aged 5–10 years and five young adults. The task required the participants to locate the target visually while performing center-out drawing movements to the located visual targets in the absence of visual feedback of hand/pen motion. Movement time (MT), terminal end-point position error (EPE), and initial directional error (IDE) were measured. The general finding is that the end-point error variability, representing the joint localization probability distributions for proprioceptive localization of the hand and visual localization of the target, was largest for the youngest children, but did not differ from one another for the older age groups. The localization distributions, as characterized by principal component analysis, showed that both errors in extent and direction were significantly larger in the youngest children. These error distributions could not be accounted for by initial localization errors prior to movement onset in the children. It is likely that at least some portion of the increased movement variability seen during sensorimotor development in young children can be attributed not only to immature control mechanisms per se, but also to partial, not yet stable, forward representations for hand localization which are used for movement perception, planning, and control.