Fine Motor Control Study

Ploog, Scharf, Nelson, and Brooks (2013) conducted a case-control study using computerized visual representations of emotional facial expressions to simulate real life situations. The use of a 3D avatar was used in three stages to study and improve emotion recognition in children with autism spectrum disorder. Stage one, participants were asked to interpret what emotion the avatar was feeling. Stage two participants were given different scenarios and were asked to guess what emotion the avatar would feel based on that specific scenario. In stage three, the children were a certain emotion that the avatar was feeling and was asked what scenario or event they thought caused this emotion. This virtual environment indicated that children were able to communicate more effectively with other people and that 90% of the participants were able to interpret, recognize and predict emotions from the avatar (Ploog et al., 2013). Wainer, and Ingersoll (2011) conducted a randomized control study with ten participants’ ages 16 to 40 using computer treatment. Participants were randomly assigned to a computer treatment …show more content…
This is a cohort study that is based off of thirtyfour participants age ranging from twelve to thirty-six months. In this study a measure of fine motor skills were used to tap motor planning and fine motor control for the children ranging in age from 12-18 months they also used a measure of vocabulary for the children at 36 months. Along with using both of those during this study they used standardized observational measures of fine motor and language skills as a “complementary source of information”. (LeBarton, E., 2013). The results for this study showed that the “composite scores were significantly lower for the HR group (M = 3.62, SD = 1.86) than the LR group (M = 5.20, SD = 1.41) (U = 215.0, p = .001)” (LeBarton, E.,