Examining the Link between Children's Cognitive Development and Touchscreen Interaction Patterns

Abstract

It is well established that children's touch and gesture interactions on touchscreen devices are different from those of adults, with much prior work showing that children's input is recognized more poorly than adults? input. In addition, researchers have shown that recognition of touchscreen input is poorest for young children and improves for older children when simply considering their age; however, individual differences in cognitive and motor development could also affect children's input. An understanding of how cognitive and motor skill influence touchscreen interactions, as opposed to only coarser measurements like age and grade level, could help in developing personalized and tailored touchscreen interfaces for each child. To investigate how cognitive and motor development may be related to children's touchscreen interactions, we conducted a study of 28 participants ages 4 to 7 that included validated assessments of the children's motor and cognitive skills as well as typical touchscreen target acquisition and gesture tasks. We correlated participants? touchscreen behaviors to their cognitive development level, including both fine motor skills and executive function. We compare our analysis of touchscreen interactions based on cognitive and motor development to prior work based on children's age. We show that all four factors (age, grade level, motor skill, and executive function) show similar correlations with target miss rates and gesture recognition rates. Thus, we conclude that age and grade level are sufficiently sensitive when considering children's touchscreen behaviors.