Inter- and intrasensory modality matching in children with hand-eye coordination problems: Exploring the developmental lag hypothesis

This study set out to explore the suggestion that the problems experienced by 8-year-old children diagnosed as clumsy in the area of hand-eye coordination (HECP) might be attributed to a developmental lag. The performances of this group of HECP children were compared with those of groups of 5-year-old and 8-year-old controls without such deficits, when required to carry out a task involving pointing, without vision, to targets located, visually, visually/proprioceptively, or proprioceptively, the dependent variable being the distance error score from the centre of the target. The performances of the HECP children, when vision or vision/proprioception was used to locate the targets, were shown to be inferior to those of the two control groups of children thereby supporting a visual deficit hypothesis. When the targets had to be located proprioceptively, the performance of the HECP children was shown to be similar to that of the 5-year-olds, while both groups were inferior to the 8-year-olds, thereby supporting a developmental lag hypothesis in proprioceptive terms. However, when the scores for the preferred and non-preferred hands were analysed separately a marked deterioration in the performances of both the 5-year-old controls and the HECP children was observed while the 8-year-old controls were unaffected. While this finding supports a developmental lag explanation of the inferior performances of the HECP children, it was necessary to qualify such an explanation when the within-group performances using the preferred and non-preferred hands were compared. Only the HECP children, under the visual/proprioceptive or proprioceptive conditions, showed significant performance differences, in favour of the preferred hand. This finding was taken as a suggestion that the developmental lag exhibited by the HECP children might have pathological overtones possibly related to the development of the corpus callosum.