Teens work on their hand-eye coordination playing Dragon's Lair - circa 1983. Photo credit: The Tribune News
I’m from the earliest generation of gamers. The first, really. I played table-top Pong when I was 7 or 8, even though it was only available in bars (parenting was more relaxed then.) I played Missile Command, despite the fact that it was kinda boring. Robotron was an obsession. I played Zork, with it’s command line interface, on my Apple IIc - drawing my own map. In college I got sucked into Myst, and Super Mario Bro.’s and there were dozens of others along the way. And then, like nearly everybody else of my generation, I quit playing video games. Why? In a word, guilt. Games were considered indulgent, addictive, violent -something for man-boys. Certainly not suitable terrain for serious people. But throughout this entire period of moralization against gaming there was always a bit of pop cognitive science floating around in defense of video games. Games build hand-eye coordination, people would say -everybody would say. After a 7 hour stint on the couch I’d think, well, at least I’ve got that going for me. In graduate school I studied cognitive science and learning theories and even video games- and never once encountered the phrase hand-eye coordination. So I set myself to wondering – what is it? is it important? and does playing video games improve it?
First of all, the terms hand-eye coordination and eye-hand coordination seem to be used interchangeably. But the former (HEC) is far more common in the pop-culture definitions of the term, and the latter (EHC) is more used in the academic and scientific literature – so I’ll maintain that distinction here. Eye-hand coordination is a neuroscience concept which links eye movement to hand movement (with and without the use of vision.) You need eye-hand coordination to use a fork, pick up a book lying on a table, and punch your secret code into the ATM. Your eyes provide spatial information and feed it to a part of the brain called the parieto occipital junction where it is combined with moto-sensory input and then communicated to the hands. But since we also use non-visual sensations known as kinesthesia to control limb movement, the picture is a bit more complex. In fact, the process involves such a wide-ranging combination of systems (the central nervous system, vision, rapid eye movements known as saccades, and multiple brain functions) that it is one of the more mysterious and studied aspects of brain science.
THe occipital-parietal cortex plays a key part in controlling eye-hand coordination.
EHC can be impaired but can it be improved? Both normal aging and a variety of disorders that cause damage to the occipital-parietal cortex, including Alzheimers, will impair EHC. One’s performance in EHC tasks are known to be explained rather tidily by Fitt’s law – a favorite principle of HCI and cognitive science researchers who are exploring point-and-click computer interfaces. Fitt’s law predicts that the time required to rapidly move to a target area (particularly when pointing) is a function of the distance to and the size of the target. Clearly the environment itself and the way it’s designed can improve or lessen a healthy person’s eye-hand coordination. But little in the literature suggests that someone’s general abilities can be improved over time. A person’s improvement in a specific physical/kinesthetic task over time is a well understood area of learning theory and is closely tied to the principle of automaticity – e.g. the ability to perform an action without occupying the mind with it’s low-level constituent tasks over time. It is even known that eye-movement differs by it’s very nature throughout the process of mastering a specific task. But an improvement in one’s overall EHC would imply that long-term exposure and expertise in one area (say, video games) is transferable to another (say, playing the piano, competing in sports, or drawing).
Importantly, eye-hand coordination is also defined by what it is not. A person’s fine motor skills, visio-spatial ability, and visual acuity are separate phenomena. Fine motor skills are learned series of movements, and more specifically, refer to the coordination of small muscles such as those in the (you guessed it) hands. Children rapidly improve their fine motor skills in their early years as they experiment with activities such as drawing and sculpting play dough. Motor skills improve naturally, except when they don’t – in which case an occupational therapist is brought in to work with the child. Visio-spatial ability is a concept linked to working memory referring to one’s “inner sketchpad.” Visio-spatial ability is crucial in one’s ability to visualize objects and tasks, coordinate multiple tasks, react and reason in three-dimensions. It’s useful in some kinds of math problems. Males typically are born with more of it, and one study has even linked male-oriented action shooter games to it’s improvement. Visual acuity is simply the sharpness and accuracy of our vision, which is mostly related to the health of the nerve cells in the eyes. To what extent it can be improved is likely to come from something ingested (foods and vitamins) and certainly not by staring at a video monitor for hours on end. Why go into all this? 1) because cultural definitions of HEC commonly blend these areas, and 2) because studies on the benefits of video gaming often make their correlations to these other phenomenon, not EHC.
Kido Rings - one of the thousands of toys and games on the market that make claims of improving hand-eye coordination
On the web, the term hand-eye coordination is thrown around with comic imprecision – which matches the anecdotal evidence I’ve collected myself over the years. A site called bodyomics.com promises that it is great for sports and can be improved by playing the Milton Bradley game, Connect Four. eHow has an article on how to improve HEC – play catch, eat zinc – and states that by doing so your performance at everyday actions like driving a car and playing with your kids will be improved. (I wonder how much research the freelancer did on this piece given that they were likely paid around $20 for it – but that’s a whole different story.) The concept is quoted frequently in parenting articles – usually under the pretense that certain kinds of activities and the use of certain toys will increase it, and that increasing it will lead to positive outcomes for the child. In fact, improving hand-eye coordination seems to have sprouted into a cottage industry. There are memory games, exercise regimens, special toys, books, and dozens of websites devoted to it. All this despite the fact that very little is understood about linking eye gazing to performance in visually guided manual tasks (see Sailer, et. al 2005). Hand-eye coordination therefore exists mainly in the minds of optimistic parents, wanna-be atheletes, and the entreprenuers that pray on them.
Meanwhile, I’ve started gaming again. My wife bought me a cheap used X-box on ebay and I started catching myself up on the last 15 years of video game evolution – including modern classics like Halo, Medal of Honor, Max Payne, and Metal Gear Solid. I did this because I am an interaction designer, and games seem to be where it’s at these days in terms of pushing the limits of interface design. I also did this because I read James Paul Gee’s What Video Games Have to Teach us About Learning and Literacy, an amazing book cataloging the true benefits of gaming. Gee cites 36 principles behind why games affect learning and development in those who play them, including the principle of projected identity, the self-knowledge principle, and the practice principle. Unsurprisingly, hand-eye coordination is not among them.
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