Developmental differences in the processing of afferent information for motor control

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Abstract
Chicoine, Lassonde, and Proteau (1992) recently proposed that young children processed independently from each other the different sources of sensory information available for controlling an aiming movement, but that maturation would result in the different sources of afferent information being processed intermodally. In this study we tested an alternative interpretation to that of Chicoine et al. Specifically, because of the limited time in which the participants of their study had to complete their movement, their results might indicate that the younger participants used an open‐looped mode of control. To test this possibility, children of different ages, as well as adults, practiced a complex, multisegment, aiming task in full vision prior to being submitted to a no‐vision transfer condition. Participants of all age‐groups had to complete the task in either 500 ms or 1,000 ms. Results indicated that the withdrawal of visual information in transfer caused larger aiming error for the adults than the younger children. These results replicated those of Chicoine et al. and suggest that the different sources of sensory information available for “online” movement control are processed largely independently from each other in young children but not in adults.

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