Acquisition of a new motor skill in preschool- and school-aged children

It is generally admitted that procedural learning abilities are efficient early in childhood. However, few studies have been carried out in this area. The aim of this study was to explore, with a perceptivo-motor learning task, whether procedural learning abilities are present to the same extent in 4-, 7-, and 10-year-old children. Forty-five children were tested. The task included 4 blocks of 12 trials during which each subject had to “catch”, as quickly as possible, several toys presented successively on the screen with a computerized inverted mouse. Retention tests, composed of 2 blocks of 12 trials, were administered 15 minutes and 1 week later. The analyses showed an important difference between groups in the first block. This difference could be related to the low ability of young children to handle the mouse and to their less developed executive functioning. On the other hand, results showed a similar learning rate between 5- and 7-year-old children, supporting the idea that procedural learning abilities are efficient early in development. However, we observed no procedural learning in10-year-old children; this unexpected result is probably due to the fact that this task was too easy for this age group, which is confirmed by the ceiling effect already observed during the first learning blocks. So, this study confirms the early efficiency of procedural abilities in childhood, but also highlights the difficulty to develop procedural learning tasks adapted to children from a large age range.