What Are Perceptual Motor Skills?

How do babies acquire the ability to crawl, push up on objects and then walk? Perceptual motor skills are the movement-related skills that are an essential aspect of human development and growth. These skills work in complement with cognitive and sensory-motor development, and are largely responsible for an individual's ability to engage in athletic activities and interact with his or her environment.

The acquisition of perceptual motor skills occurs in three phases. First is the cognitive stage, which focuses on understanding what is involved in the task. The associative stage follows and focuses on practice. Finally, the autonomous stage, which focuses on improvement of speed and accuracy is acquired when the other two stages have been mastered.

Examples of perceptual motor skills include hand-eye coordination, body-eye coordination, auditory language skills, postural adjustment and visual-auditory skills. Young children can practice perceptual motor skills through active play, object manipulation, drawing, blocks and various other forms of physical activity.

Most perceptual motor skills such as crawling, rolling over, jumping, reaching and walking, are developed naturally along normally expected growth time-lines. However, if one or more such milestones are missed or delayed, some intervention might be required. Occasionally, children who are particularly inactive in their early years may suffer from delays in perceptual motor skills. These can be rectified through basic intervention which involve a combination of physical and sensory play.

Cognitive skills, which develop along with perceptual motor skills, play a role in a person's performance in academic subjects, while perceptual motor skills are required for performing athletic and physical tasks, such as playing a sport. Perceptual motor skills are more primitive, and are more narrow in the way that they are expressed, compared to cognitive skills. Furthermore, it is more difficult to verbalize a perceptual motor skill (such as, how to ride a bicycle) than a cognitive skill (such as, how to add two numbers).

Physiological damage to the basal ganglia, a grouped cluster of neurons located in the medial temporal lobe of the brain, has been linked to a dysfunction in the learning of perceptual-motor skills. Many disorders are associated with this perceptual skills dysfunction. Disease such as Parkinson's disease and Huntington's disease also involve issues with working memory and mental switching between memory tasks. Patients that have had a stroke or a traumatic brain injury can also have perceptual-motor deficits or losses of skills.