A Step for Educational Neuroscience: Exploring the Relationship Between Visuospatial Attention and Handwriting Performance in Children

Abstract

Humans require attention (or ‘focus’), a cognitive function, in almost everything they do on a daily basis, with children in particular relying on attention for successful learning in the classroom. It is well understood through neural evidence how attention is allocated across visual space: regions of frontal and parietal cortex (i.e. the ‘fronto-parietal network’) undergo competitive interactions between hemispheres to control the allocation of spatial attention across the visual field. However, how the allocation of attention across visual space develops in the general population of children is unclear. Importantly, spatial attention function seems to affect children’s everyday behavior, such as handwriting. Previous studies have found that children who struggle with attention function (such as attention deficit disorder) often struggle with handwriting. Many of their poor handwriting characteristics, such as insufficient ability to consistently begin writing at the left margin line or inadequate spacing of letters and words, could potentially be mediated by spatial attention. Thus, I hypothesized that children’s poor handwriting is related to the imbalanced interactions between hemispheres when children allocate attention over visual space (i.e. spatial bias). Here I examined the distribution of spatial bias in the general population of children (grades 1-8), as measured by the landmark task, and its relationship with handwriting ability, as measured by a handwriting task. I found that (1) children, on average, display an attentional bias toward the left side of space that tends to shift toward a close-to adult pattern with normally distributed spatial biases as children get older; (2) handwriting ability improves with age; and (3) there is a moderate positive relationship between magnitude of leftward spatial bias and overall handwriting ability. The results suggest that the attention network matures through childhood development by finding a balance between hemispheres, and that an unbalanced attention network moderately drives poor handwriting in children. The current study advances educational neuroscience by providing insight into possible education strategies to help children maximize their potential in the classroom.