Inter- and intra-sensory modality matching by 8-year-old children diagnosed as having hand-eye co-ordination problems (HECP) and by a control group of children without such problems were tested using a target-location and pointing task. The task required the children to locate target pins visually (seen target), with the hand (felt target) or in combination (felt and seen target), while pointing to the located target was always carried out without vision. The most striking finding, for both the control and the HECP children, was the superiority of performance when the target had to be located visually. When combined scores for both hands were analysed, the HECP children showed inferior performance to the control children in both inter- and intra-modal matching. Analyses of the scores achieved with the preferred and non-preferred hand separately, however, demonstrated that the differences between the HECP and the control children could, in the main, be attributed to lowered performances when the non-preferred hand was used for pointing to the target. When pointing with the preferred hand, the only significant difference between the groups was when the target was visually located, the control children showing superior performance. Pointing with the non-preferred hand gave rise to significant differences, in favour of the control children, when the target was located visually, with the hand or in combination. These findings suggest that earlier studies, using only the preferred hand or a combination of the scores of both hands, might need to be qualified. Putative neurological disorders in the HECP children are invoked to account for the poor performance with the non-preferred hand.

No abstract

Physical education (PE) is perhaps the school subject most likely to produce relative age effects (RAE). Like in sports, physical maturity gives students an advantage in PE, which might well be mistaken for superior ability. The aim of the present study is to investigate the extent to which physical growth, measured as height, and RAE reflect the assessment in Norwegian PE. Furthermore, we wanted to examine whether there is any gender differences in the assessment in PE as a function of physical growth and RAE. The participants (n = 2978) were pupils in the last three years of secondary school (13-16 years old). A custom-made questionnaire was designed to collect the necessary data. The correlations between height and mark in PE for boys in 8th, 9th, and 10th grades are respectively r = 0.14, r = 0.32, and r = 0.29. For girls, the correlations are r = 0.11, r = 0.33, and r = 0.21. All correlations are significant (p < .05). The number of pupils achieving top marks was 114 in the first half of the year, whereas it was 65 in the second half of the year. The present study showed that physical growth has an impact on the pupils' PE attainment. The physical growth is of course also mediated by the pupils' age. RAEs were found in PE attainments also in the Norwegian school system for both genders, despite all the intentions expressed in the PE curriculum.

No abstract

The current experiment investigated generalizability of motor learning in proximal versus distal effectors in upper extremities. Twenty-eight participants were divided into three groups: training proximal effectors, training distal effectors, and no training control group (CG). Performance was tested pre- and post-training for specific learning and three learning transfer conditions: (1) bilateral learning transfer between homologous effectors, (2) lateral learning transfer between non-homologous effectors, and (3) bilateral learning transfer between non-homologous effectors. With respect to specific learning, both training groups showed significant, similar improvement for the trained proximal and distal effectors, respectively. In addition, there was significant learning transfer to all three transfer conditions, except for bilateral learning transfer between non-homologous effectors for the distal training group. Interestingly, the proximal training group showed significantly larger learning transfer to other effectors compared to the distal training group. The CG did not show significant improvements from pre- to post-test. These results show that learning is partly effector independent and generalizable to different effectors, even though transfer is suboptimal compared to specific learning. Furthermore, there is a proximal-distal gradient in generalizability, in that learning transfer from trained proximal effectors is larger than from trained distal effectors, which is consistent with neuroanatomical differences in activation of proximal and distal muscles.