Typical Development of Finger Position Sense From Late Childhood to Adolescence

Abstract

Finger position sense is a proprioceptive modality highly important for fine motor control. Its developmental time course is largely unknown. This cross-sectional study examined its typical development in 138 children (8–17 years) and a group of 14 healthy young adults using a fast and novel psychophysical test that yielded objective measures of position sense acuity. Participants placed their hands underneath a computer tablet and judged the perceived position of their unseen index finger relative to two visible areas displayed on a tablet following a two-forced-choice paradigm. Responses were fitted to a psychometric acuity function from which the difference between the point-of-subjective-equality and the veridical finger position (ΔPSE) was derived as a measure of position sense bias, and the uncertainty area (UA) as a measure of precision. The main results are: First, children under 12 exhibited a significantly greater UA than adults while adolescent children (13–17 years) exhibited no significant differences when compared to adults. Second, no significant age-related differences in ΔPSE were found across the age range of 8–17 years. This implies that the typical development of finger position sense from late childhood to adulthood is characterized as an age-dependent increase in proprioceptive precision and not as a decrease in bias.

Keywords:

• development
• human
• psychophysics
• proprioception

Acknowledgments

We sincerely thank child participants and their parents who agreed to participate in this study at the Minnesota State Fair. Data collection at the fair was organized by the Driven to Discover Research Facility at the University of Minnesota. We thank Dr. Divya Bhaskaran, Dr. Naveen Elangovan and Jacquelyn Sertic from the Human Sensorimotor Control Laboratory for assisting in data collection.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interests was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This study was supported by the Office of the Vice President for Research at the University of Minnesota under the Grant-in-Aid #468390 awarded to Jürgen Konczak.