Aprendizado motor em crianças: comparação entre 06 e 10 anos / Motor learning in children: comparison between 06 and 10 years old

AUTOR(ES)
DATA DE PUBLICAÇÃO

2007

RESUMO

Motor learning is a process triggered by training, which involves numerous synaptic changes that are initially temporary, and further, with the stimulus continuity, consolidate definitively. As such process cannot be measured directly in vivo, the measures taken as evidences of their consolidation are behavioral, that is, they are performance change measures triggered by training. A greater knowledge on the factors that interfere on the motor learning process is extremely important for all the sciences that investigate the effects of motor training, such as Pedagogy, Physical Education, Occupational Therapy, Physiotherapy, among others, as they enable the implementation of more specific approaches. Among several important factors, this investigation has elected age, since today it is not clear how to differentiate training for children at different age ranges. The question about the possible effects of age on the process is supported by the fact that the human brain, upon birth, is not completely developed, and this development will only be reached approximately two decades later. Thus, as the learning process depends on several brain structures, which operate in a complex and synchronized way, it is plausible assuming that children at different maturity stages of the Nervous System, and under the same training conditions, achieve different performances. Thus, this work aimed at investigating eventual differences in the motor learning process, by analyzing the performance of a new task, among healthy children from 6 to 10 years old. To do that, the motor performance was compared for a task of hands fingers opposition, in two different sequences, one trained by means of 4 blocks with 600 motions, and the other taken as control, in a group of 16 (sixteen) six-year old children (6.5+0.2), and another one comprised by 10 (ten) 9-10-year old children (9.6+0.50). The performance for both sequences was taken in 6 different times: before, 2 minutes, 4, 7, 14 and 28 days after the training sessions, and then statistically analyzed via ANOVA for repeated measures. The results achieved during the training evidenced that, in terms of finger opposition speed, smaller children initially presented a slowness, which disappeared after the first 600 repetitions. By its turn, the performance for the same motions within a specific sequence showed the opposite behavior: smaller children initially presented the same performance when compared to the older ones, but after the first training block, the latter ones became more and more efficient in terms of training results. The analysis of the results achieved with the sequence taken for control purposes showed that smaller children presented difficulty in generalizing the learning for the reverse sequence. When considered as a set, these results indicate differences in the training results between 6- and 10-year old children, discussed in this investigation as especially associated to differences in the cognitive functions involved in skill construction, coherent with the maturity differences of the Nervous System, expected between these ages.

ASSUNTO(S)

cognition children motor learning aprendizagem motora development desenvolvimento cognição crianças

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