Individual differences in motor timing and its relation to cognitive and fine motor skills
Abstract
The present study investigated the relationship between individual differences in timing movements at the level of
milliseconds and performance on selected cognitive and fine motor skills. For this purpose, young adult participants
(N = 100) performed a repetitive movement task paced by an auditory metronome at different rates. Psychometric measures
included the digit-span and symbol search subtasks from the Wechsler battery as well as the Raven SPM. Fine motor skills
were assessed with the Purdue Pegboard test. Motor timing performance was significantly related (mean r = .3) to cognitive
measures, and explained both unique and shared variance with information-processing speed of Raven’s scores. No
significant relations were found between motor timing measures and fine motor skills. These results show that individual
differences in cognitive and motor timing performance is to some extent dependent upon shared processing not associated
with individual differences in manual dexterity.
Description
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