Commentary

Excerpt

Kluzik, Fetters, and Coryell are to be commended for their process-oriented approach to the study of movement control in children with cerebral palsy. Their article continues a growing shift away from attempts to document motor performance in these patients using traditional methods such as surveys of motor skill attainment. Instead, the authors attempt to identify and to quantify important features of reaching behavior, features that are more likely to shed light on the short-term effects of therapeutic intervention.

What is most encouraging about this work is not that the authors have used quantitative measures of reaching per se. Many studies of the gait patterns and other behaviors of this population have measured kinematic and electromyographic variables. Rather, the use of measures derived from theoretical work on basic processes underlying voluntary movement is of greatest significance.…