Background/Purpose Studies of children with Developmental Coordination Disorder indicate quite convincingly that these children have difficulties with mentally representing action (via motor imagery) resulting in poor performance on motor ability tests (e.g., Deconinick et al., 2008; Williams et al., 2008). With the present study, we examined in typically developing children, the association between general motor ability and a relatively unreported form of action representation – estimation of reachability. That is, judging whether an object is within or out of reach via motor imagery. Our initial prediction was that there would be a positive association between higher levels of general motor ability and estimation accuracy.
Method Children, aged 7- to 11 years, were assessed for estimates of reach via motor imagery with targets randomly presented in peripersonal (within reach) and extrapersonal space (out of grasp). This was followed by an assessment of general motor ability using the Movement ABC-2 (Henderson et al., 2007).
Analysis/Results ANOVA results indicated no difference between age and total estimation accuracy (p > .05); participants displayed significantly less error in peripersonal compared to extrapersonal space. Regression analysis indicated that there was a significant relationship between estimation accuracy and motor ability, p = .03. Furthermore, correlation results for motor ability subcategories indicated that only Balance was significant in the model, explaining 20% of the variance for the total score in reach estimation.
Conclusions In summary, these results suggest that the child's motor ability and the ability to mentally represent action via estimation of reach are positively related.
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