The Effects of Auditory Cues and Task Complexity on Inter-limb Coordination and Perception-action Coupling in Children and Adults: A Developmental Trend

• Main Authors: Hsiang-fei Hung, 洪湘斐
• Other Authors: Rong-Ju Cherng
• Format: Others
• Language: zh-TW
• Published: 2008
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/94770330141564495857

碩士 === 國立成功大學 === 物理治療研究所 === 96 === Background and purposes: To act adaptively in one’s environment requires all kinds of task- and environment-related information to base on for choosing appropriate muscle responses. After born, children are constantly adapting to the environment and need to learn and perform more complex motor tasks with increases in age. The inter-limbs coordination and perception-action coupling are two keystone abilities of the complex motor skills. Previous studies that investigated the inter-limbs coordination and the perception-action coupling in gross motor tasks for children were limited. The effects of auditory cue on inter-limbs coordination and the task complexity on perception-action coupling were unclear. Therefore, the purposes of the present study were to investigate: (1) the effects of external auditory cues on inter-limbs coordination; (2) the effects of task complexity on the inter-limbs coordination and perception-action coupling; and (3) the developmental trend of above behaviors. Method: A total of 68 normal subjects participated in the study and constituted five age groups: 5-6, 7-8, 9-10, 11-12 years old and young adults. Participants were required to perform marching or clapping alone as single-gross-motor tasks, and marching together with clapping as dual-gross-motor task in three auditory cue conditions. The auditory cue conditions were no cue, cue with self-selected step frequency of pure tone and cue with self-selected clap frequency of pure tone. The coefficients of variances (CVs) of action frequency and step-clap phasing value within-trials were used to examine the performance of inter-limbs coordination. The mean and CV of perception-action phasing value were adopted as the indicators of perception-action coupling ability. The effects of age, limb action, task complexity and cue conditions on the dependent variables were tested with Repeated Measures ANOVA. Results: The CV of action frequency decreased with an increase in age and it was larger in cues with preferred step frequency of tone condition than it in no-cue or cues with self-selected clap frequency of tone conditions. CV of clap frequency increased with an increase in task complexity, but CV of step frequency did not change. Furthermore, CV of step-clap phasing decreased with an increase in age but remained constant across cue conditions. The differences between any two groups were significant but not between either 5-6 and 7-8 years groups or 9-10 and 11-12 years groups. The increase of task complexity would increase the mean perception-action phasing value. The mean clap-cue phasing values were larger in children aged 7-10 than adults and children aged 11-12. Furthermore, both mean and CV of clap-cue phasing value varied with the changes of cue frequency, but the performance of step-cue phasing stayed constant. Conclusion: Inter-limbs coordination improves with the increase of age. Depending on the cue frequency, the auditory cue has no effect or detrimental effect on inter-limbs coordination for normal subjects. Task complexity reduces the accuracy, but not stability, of perception-action coupling, and the effects are similar across age groups.