Attentional influences on motor control
Subtitle: a possible link to momentary clumsiness.
Published: 2004
Language: eng
Number of pages: 190
Description: These studies explored individual differences in the tendency to perform movements involving non-optimal motor control, such as knocking over a glass or tripping up the stairs. Such acts were termed momentary clumsy behaviours, and the link between these types of behaviours and attention was of primary interest in this research. Twenty participants in each age group (7- and 8-year-olds, 11- and 12-year-olds, and young adults) completed all experiments in 2 testing sessions. Two measures of momentary clumsiness were obtained for all individuals, including one based on a 2-week daily phone interview and another based on an induced clumsiness experimental measure. In Experiment 1, various measures of attentional style were correlated with the measures of momentary clumsiness. A high incidence of momentary clumsy behaviours was associated with a narrow focus of attention, and specifically, the tendency to ignore irrelevant and distracting stimuli. Furthermore, incidence of momentary clumsy behaviour was found to remain fairly stable with age and was not related to differences in motor ability. In Experiment 2, participants were required to complete a perceptual-motor tracing task involving the avoidance of obstacles in conjunction with a cognitive backwards counting task. Those individuals high in momentary clumsiness were found, in some cases, to have more difficulty with the concurrent task conditions, revealing a more uneven distribution of attentional resources during completion. These findings provided further support for the notion that individuals high in momentary clumsiness are more narrowly focused, whereas those low in momentary clumsiness have a more broad distribution of attentional resources. A manipulation of visual information during completion of the combined task was included to allow for an interpretation in terms of the precise aspect of motor control that is vulnerable to attentional effects. However, as individuals assigned their own priority to the competing tasks and emphasized the perceptual-motor task over the cognitive one, no such interpretation was possible. The general findings of this research were discussed in relation to children who are accident prone, as well as those with developmental coordination disorder. Several possible avenues for future research were also identified by this work.
Notes: Adviser:  Mark Schmuckler.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Toronto, 2004.

Electronic version licensed for access by U. of T. users.

Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 65-10, Section: B, page: 5431.