‘Putting your foot in it’! A window into clumsy behaviour

Intra-modal matching by 7-year-old children diagnosed as having hand-eye co-ordination problems (HECP) and a control group of children without such problems was tested using a target location and matching task. The ‘foot-hand’ task required the children to locate a target pin with the ‘big-toe’ (felt target) and match the located target position with the hand, without vision. There were four conditions: location via right foot-matching the located target with the right hand (R fR h) and left hand (R fL h) and location via left foot-matching the located target with the left hand (L fL h) and right hand (L fR h). Both groups demonstrated better performance in the intra- as compared to the inter-hemispheric conditions, suggesting that the corpus callosum is not yet fully mature at this age. The HECP children showed inferior performance to the control children in three of the four conditions, the conditions where the right hemisphere was involved and/or information had to be transported across the corpus callosum (R fL h; L fL h; L fR h). Two possible explanations of these findings are put forward and discussed: right hemisphere insufficiency with or without dysfunctional corpus callosum.