Is perceived motor competence a constraint in children's action planning?

Full Abstract

A form of action representation of developmental interest is reach estimation-the perceptual and cognitive judgment of whether an object is within or out of reach. A common observation among children is overestimation, which, speculatively, has been linked to perceived motor competence (PMC). The authors examined the PMC effect on reachability among 7-, 9-, and 11-year-old children. The authors predicted that with higher PMC, participants would display greater overestimation and that this outcome would show a developmental trend with younger children displaying greater overestimation complementing higher PMC scores. Results revealed no age differences in total error for reach, and all age groups overestimated. Regarding PMC, the 7-year-old childrens' scores were significantly higher than those of their older counterparts. However, relation analyses revealed no support for the idea that PMC was significantly associated with reachability. The findings suggested that a general measure of PMC is not a good predictor of childrens' action planning through reach estimation. Furthermore, if PMC in some form is a psychological constraint, future studies should be tied to context-specific measures of perceived abilities in relation to the specificity of the task.

Author information

Author/s: Gabbard, Carl (C); Caçola, Priscila (P); Cordova, Alberto (A);

Affiliation: Motor Development Laboratory, Texas A&M University, College Station 77843, USA. c-gabbard(-atsign-)tamu.edu

Journal and publication information

Publication Type: Journal Article

Journal: The Journal of genetic psychology (J Genet Psychol), published in United States. (Language: eng)

Reference: 2009-Jun; vol 170 (issue 2) : pp 151-8

Dates: Created 2009/06/04; Completed 2009/06/11;

PMID: 19492731, status: MEDLINE (last retrieval date: 6/11/2009, IMS Date: 11 Jun 2009 00:00:00)

Sourced from the National Library of Medicine. Abstract text and other information may be subject to copyright.

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