Children’s Age-Related Performance in Striking Moving Targets
Open Access
- Author:
- Rothenberg-Cunningham, Alek
- Graduate Program:
- Kinesiology
- Degree:
- Master of Science
- Document Type:
- Master Thesis
- Date of Defense:
- None
- Committee Members:
- Karl Maxim Newell, Thesis Advisor/Co-Advisor
Karl Maxim Newell, Thesis Advisor/Co-Advisor - Keywords:
- coincidence-anticipation
interception
spatiotemporal - Abstract:
- ABSTRACT Previous studies of coincidence-anticipation timing have indicated that age-related improvements in accuracy appear to asymptote between late adolescence and early adulthood. Moreover, performance differences between boys and girls have been reported, although with less consistency. Contextual factors and target properties have been proposed as playing a role for the observed age and sex effects although approaches to elucidate the underlying mechanisms, including perceptual-motor systems, have been more concentrated to adult populations. In this experiment we investigated the effect of target velocity and gravity influences on children’s age-related interceptive performance. There were 4 levels of gravity and 4 levels of velocity applied to the target trajectory. Interception accuracy, response latency, movement time and performance scores for interceptions were measured in 4 age groups of participants 7-8, 11-12, 15-16 and 19-20 years of age (n = 10). The targets to be intercepted were presented on a digital graphics tablet using a custom program that simulated aspects of baseball. The performance score was given for each trial that resulted in a positive hit and represented the distance the target/ball travelled after being struck. It was hypothesized that younger children would exhibit longer response latencies and movement times as the speed of information processing would be negatively correlated with experience. It was anticipated that girls would attain lower performance scores compared to boys as contextual factors, as opposed to biological factors, are more likely to augment the males’ responses as the current task demands are more similar to activities engaged by boys at younger ages. The results showed that younger children performed with the least amount of accuracy and were affected more by higher target velocity. Girls age 7-8 years initially exhibited less accuracy in interception but had significantly greater accuracy compared to males age at 11-12 years. Despite reaching a mature level of accuracy at an earlier age, females’ distance scores remained lower compared to boys across all ages. The persistence of speed-coupling effects, correlating effector response earlier or later for faster or slower moving targets, respectively, is taken as evidence that target velocity is a critical factor in the perceptual-motor system. The large difference in performance between younger and older children, and adolescents and adults may reflect a less developed perceptual system and/or a more rudimentary method for predicting target locations. The greater sensitivity of younger children to changes in target behavior whether explained in terms of a developmental process augmenting the perceptual system, motor system, or both in concert remains unexplained.