Laterality of arm movement variability on copying and tracing

Handwriting is a complex behavior requiring the writer's visual, motor, and cognitive integration skills. Previous studies using motion analysis [1,2] have shown that children with handwriting difficulties (HD) showed more vertical variation in the writing arms than typically developing children during figure writing tasks. However, these studies did not evaluate the laterality of both sides of arms during handwriting. Moreover, previous studies [1,2] did not used figure tracing task and this task would help us find the arm movement variabilities without considering the visuo-motor integration difficulties. To investigate the laterality of arm movement variabilities, I asked participants to copy and trace the figures while their body movement was recorded with motion analysis software.