Sequential effects after practice with the dominant and non-dominant hand on the acquisition of a sliding task in schoolchildren

Abstract

This study was designed to investigate sequential effects after practice with the dominant and non-dominant hand on the acquisition of a new motor task. A total of 64 middle school children were asked to practise a cent-slide task, which required them to slide coins from one side of a cardboard into a circular target on the opposite side. Four groups practised this task within different practice schedules: (1) participants practised only with their dominant hand (right-only group); (2) participants used only their non-dominant hand (left-only group); (3) participants started to practise the skill with their dominant hand and then switched to their non-dominant hand (right-to-left group); or (4) participants started to practise the skill with their non-dominant hand and then switched to their dominant hand (left-to-right group). The acquisition of the task was facilitated after initial practice with the non-dominant hand. This was reflected in a better retention of the task and a stronger performance under a modified testing situation of the left-to-right group when compared to all other groups. Also, the left-only group showed larger interlimb transfer effects to the untrained hand than the right-only group. It is concluded that the sequence in which the dominant and non-dominant hands are used to practise influences the acquisition of new motor tasks.

Keywords:

• Skill acquisition
• Motor learning
• Interlimb transfer
• Hemispheric specialization

Acknowledgements

The present study was conducted by the first author as a partial requirement to receive the Teachers Education degree at the University of Jena, Germany. We would like to express our gratitude to Dr Gerhard Kirchner for supporting the project and to Dr Tino Stöckel for an extended discussion on the topic. Also, we thank Dr Michael Peters and two anonymous reviewers for helpful comments on an earlier version of this manuscript.

Notes

¹There was a main effect of hand, but no significant interaction of hand with any other factor. Thus the data are collapsed across hands, because hand did not have a selective effect on the two-way interaction of group × test. Any differences between the groups to be observed in post hoc comparisons therefore affected both hands equally.