L’apprentissage procédural chez le jeune enfant : présentation d’un nouvel outil d’évaluation

The authors generally agree that procedural learning abilities play an important role in the child development and that they are present early in childhood. However, few studies have been carried out in this area because of the difficulty to develop tests specifically designed for the evaluation of these capacities in young children. In this study, we presented a new task aimed to evaluate visuo-motor skill learning in the young child. The purpose of the present study was to explore whether procedural learning abilities are present in the same extent in 4-year as 7- and 10-year-old children. Our sample is composed of 60 children divided into 3 age-groups. The task is composed of 5 blocks of 12 trials during which each subject has to use a reversed mouse of a computer in order to “catch” different toys appearing on the screen; 2 blocks of 12 trials was administered after a 15 minutes delay. Our results show an important difference between the groups for the first block; on the other hand, for the next blocks, the results show an absence of age-related difference between participants in our perceptive-motor skill learning task, confirming the idea according to which procedural learning abilities are efficient early in development (the difference observed during the first block being probably due to the intervention of executive mechanisms).