Fine motor skills and visuospatial deductive reasoning

One of the things that has happened with the growth of electronic devices and changes in children’s clothing is that young children may not be developing the fine motor skills that come from working with a pencil or crayon, turning the pages of a book, tying a shoelace, managing buttons and snaps, learning to write in cursive, etc. While children may be practicing fine motor skills less often, they often engage in athletic activities and video games that benefit from visuospatial deductive reasoning which, in turn, is important in much of mathematics. The study described here indicates that fine motor skills may need to be emphasized again. Cortes, Green, Barr, & Ryan (2022) published “Fine Motor Skills During Early Childhood Predict Visuospatial Deductive Reasoning in Adolescence” in Developmental Psychology. Here’s their abstract with some findings put in bold by me:

Extensive evidence and theory suggest that the development of motor skills during infancy and early childhood initiates a “developmental cascade” for cognitive abilities, such as reading and math. Motor skills are closely connected with the development of spatial cognition, an ability that supports deductive reasoning. Despite the linkage between motor skills and spatial cognition, and spatial cognition with deductive reasoning, no research has explored the developmental connection between early motor skills and reasoning ability, a plausible pathway through which the developmental cascade operates. Drawing data from the 1970 British Cohort Study (N = 1,233; 95% British, 5% other race/ethnicity; 54% male, 46% female; 7% low income, 80% middle income, 12% high income), this study investigated whether there was a relationship between gross and fine motor skills in infancy (22 months of age) and early childhood (42 months of age) and visuospatial deductive reasoning in adolescence (at 10 and 16 years of age). Results indicated that fine but not gross motor skills during early childhood positively predicted reasoning in adolescence. Critically, the fine motor-reasoning association mediated the previously observed link between early fine motor skills and adolescent reading and math ability. These results deepen our understanding of developmental cascade theory and mental model theory by identifying visuospatial reasoning (i.e., mental modeling) as a potential mechanism through which motor skills initiate cognitive development and academic success in reading and math. These findings also highlight the importance of early intervention programs targeting motor skills and illuminate the impact of those interventions on later cognitive and academic skills. 

I like this study because it uses a large sample of participants and is longitudinal. One might assume that playing a sport effectively replaces fine motor skill practice. However, the finding that it is fine motor skills more than gross motor skills that predict reasoning in adolescence suggests otherwise.