The Effects of Hand-Finger Exercise on Human Handwriting Performance

Two experiments with twelve subjects each were conducted to study the effects of exhaustive hand-finger exercise on the pace and accuracy of fine motor performance in a pattern tracing task. In Experiment I, subjects performed for ten trials without exercise preceeding five trials with exercise. In Experiment II, the reversed order was used. Results show that while for average adults, hand-finger exercise did not interfere with the task accuracy in both experiments, performance pace was significantly accelerated under the exercise conditions. Some implications are discussed.