Different post-training processes in children’s and adults’ motor skill learning

Esther Adi-Japha, Roni Berke, Nehama Shaya, Mona S. Julius

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

19 Scopus citations

Abstract

Do young children and adults share similar underlying motor skill learning mechanisms? Past studies have shown that school-aged children’s speed of performance developed over wake periods of a few hours post-training. Such training-dependent gains were not found in adults. In the current study of children as young as 5-years-old and young adults who practiced a simple grapho-motor task, this finding was replicated only by the children that showed faster performance a few hours post-training. These positive gains in performance speed were retained two weeks later. Furthermore, among the children, variations in gains attained a few hours post-training were associated with initial performance level. These behavioral findings indicate different underlying post-training processes in children’s and adults’ motor skill learning thus, supporting differential tutoring of skills.

Original languageEnglish
Article numbere0210658
JournalPLoS ONE
Volume14
Issue number1
DOIs
StatePublished - Jan 2019

Bibliographical note

Publisher Copyright:
© 2019 Adi-Japha et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

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