Acquisition of visuomanual skills and improvement of information processing capacities in 6- to 10-year-old children performing a 2D pointing task

The aim of this study was to investigate motor performance and visuomanual control through the analysis of Fitts' law in 6-, 8-, and 10-year-old children and adults performing a constrained two-dimensional pointing task. Participants were required to point and click on targets appearing on a laptop computer screen with a standard computer mouse. Three sizes of targets were used to create different indexes of difficulty. Analysis first showed linear visuomanual abilities to perform bi-dimensional pointing movements. It appears that developmental motor performance changes are due to combined enhanced programming processes and online feedback processing. Immature visuomanual control of 10-year-old children could be explained by higher cognitive requirements related to the task. As predicted by Fitts' law, movement time linearly decreases with the enlargement of target width. Moreover, a regression analysis of movement time on index of difficulty (ID) clearly showed significant differences for cognitive processing capacities with age: increasing ID effects are more dramatic in younger children performing computer mouse pointing movements.