Seyed Kavoos Salehi; Davood Homenian; Mahdi Zarghami; Sadegh Satari Fard
Abstract
Learning motor tasks is one of the fundamental attributes of mankind'sexperiences and is a collection of sensitive, cognitive and motor processes. Manyof complex motor behaviors are performed based on a type of order or sequence.In the present study, the developmental differences in motor sequence learningwere ...
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Learning motor tasks is one of the fundamental attributes of mankind'sexperiences and is a collection of sensitive, cognitive and motor processes. Manyof complex motor behaviors are performed based on a type of order or sequence.In the present study, the developmental differences in motor sequence learningwere examined in three groups of children (age range 7,8,10 yr) and one controlgroup of adults. For this purpose, the professional software of sequential stimuli,time record and response error was designed in C++. 48 right-handed participants(3 groups of 12 children and 1 group of 12 adults) who were healthy in theirnervous system and had no prior experience of the mentioned task participated inthis study. The intervention included 10 stages (8 stages for acquisition and 2stages for retention). Performance was assessed by examining changes in accuracyand response coordination. The data were analyzed with factor analysis ofvariance and Kolmogorov-Smirnov test. The results showed a developmentalprogression in motor sequence learning in all groups. Interestingly, differentdevelopmental trajectories were observed in response accuracy and coordination.There was a significant difference in response accuracy between 7,8-year-oldgroups and adults and 10-year-old groups in the acquisition phase but nosignificant difference was observed between adults and 10-year-old-group. Forresponse coordination, adults responded to the stimuli more synchronously than allchildren and 10-year-old group responded more quickly than 6-year-old group. Inthe retention test, for response accuracy, 10-year-old group's performance wassimilar to adults and for response coordination, adults performed more
synchronously than all groups but 7-year-old group had a delay in responsecoordination compared to the other groups. Overall, the differences observed inresponse accuracy and coordination was consistent with the hypothesis thataccuracy may rely on cortical pathways that show their greatest maturationbetween ages of 7 and 10 whereas coordination may rely on subcortical pathwaysthat continue to develop into young adulthood. The findings suggested that in onehand, various aspects of motor development influence motor learning and on theother hand during the learning of different components of a task, parameters thatare more difficult with regard to motor control ( for example responsecoordination) are acquired and maintained in a longer process.
