Perceptual motor skills are physical skills that require coordination between physical actions and visual perception. These skills are developed in childhood and can be improved with practice. Visual perception is the most important sense for these skills, and developmental disorders can hinder their development.
Perceptual motor skills are physical skills that require perceptual input to be performed based on the intentions of the moving individual. Hand-eye coordination, for example, is a perceptual motor skill because one must coordinate the physical actions of one’s hands with one’s visual perception to obtain a certain desired result. Simple actions such as walking and avoiding obstacles, kicking a ball, and eating all require perceptual motor skills, as do more complex skills such as those used in dance, martial arts, and many other athletic and artistic pursuits. Most people develop sufficient perceptual motor skills in childhood, but many choose to develop them further to participate in a certain sport, art or other activity.
Most perceptual motor skills rely on visual perception, as this generally provides the most information about the environment and the positions of one’s body parts. When one reaches for an object in its environment, for example, it generally sees the object and then coordinates its physical action based on that visual perception. It is possible to act by touch, hearing or even smell, but it is usually much more difficult and leads to much less precise and less coordinated movements. Only sight can be used effectively to judge the position of one’s limbs in relation to various elements of one’s environment.
Perceptual motor skills used in daily life are, in most cases, developed during early childhood development. Babies learn to walk, manipulate objects in their environment, and engage in many other perception-based actions. Over time, children learn to more precisely connect their actions with their perceptions, thereby conducting such actions more gracefully and correctly. A variety of different developmental disorders can cause cognitive, perceptual, or physical problems that delay or altogether prevent the development of some perceptual motor skills.
Although nearly all people naturally develop the basic perceptual motor skills needed to navigate and interact with their environments, some people choose to develop those skills further. Improving perceptual motor skills, like hitting a baseball or performing a certain dance move, takes practice and repetition. At first, you will probably need to go through the action slowly, but over time you tend to become familiar with the relevant physical, perceptual and environmental factors. With enough practice, new physical skills that rely on perception can become completely automatic.
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