Impaired motor coordination is prevalent in children with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) and affects adaptive skills. Little is known about the development of motor patterns in young children with ASD between 2 and 6 years of age. The purpose of the current study was threefold: (1) to describe developmental correlates of motor coordination in children with ASD, (2) to identify the extent to wh...

BACKGROUND Daily life motor skills of children with acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL) were studied during treatment using the Movement Assessment Battery for Children (Movement ABC). In addition, the possible relation with vincristine treatment was investigated. PROCEDURE Seventeen children treated for ALL, aged 4-12 years, were compared to an age- and sex-matched control group. RESULTS Th...

Physiological aging is paralleled by a decline of fine motor skills accompanied by structural and functional alterations of the underlying brain network. Here, we aim to investigate age-related changes in the spectral distribution of neuronal oscillations during fine skilled motor function. We employ the concept of spectral entropy in order to describe the flatness and peaked-ness of a frequenc...

The main problems in immersive free-hand interfaces for artists are devices and methods to reach the level of fine motor skills in the human artistic capacity. The artist needs more solutions to flexibly master how the hand traces are left in the graphics. Leaving traces in immersion should not be only an action of controlling the route, but controlling also a variable outlook of the becoming l...

Peripersonal space (PPS) representation depends on the activity of a fronto-parietal network including the premotor cortex (PMc) and the posterior parietal cortex (PPc). PPS representation has a direct effect on the motor system: a stimulus activating the PPS around the hand modulates the excitability of hand representation in the primary motor cortex. However, to date, direct information about...

Damage to the developing brain may lead to impairment of the hand motor function and negatively impact on patients' quality of life. Development of manual dexterity and finger and hand motor function may be promoted by learning to play the piano. The latter brings together music with the intensive training of hand coordination and fine finger mobility. We investigated if learning to play the pi...

Right-handers tend to associate "good" with the right side of space and "bad" with the left. This implicit association appears to arise from the way people perform actions, more or less fluently, with their right and left hands. Here we tested whether observing manual actions performed with greater or lesser fluency can affect observers' space-valence associations. In two experiments, we assign...