Your hand-eye coordination allows your visual system to coordinate what you see with your hand motions. Activities such as handwriting, tossing a ball and cleaning your house require hand-eye coordination. Most sports require some kind of hand-coordination. Baseball players use this skill while batting, pitching and catching. Hockey players guide sticks and pucks with this skill. A swimmer even uses hand-eye coordination to accurately propel her stroke in a straight line.
The Beginning
You start developing hand-eye coordination after two to four months of life by looking at objects and grabbing at them. Top-level reaching occurs at the initial stages of hand-eye coordination. Infants practice this hand-eye coordination by looking at and grasping objects with the palm of the hand. Hand-eye coordination progresses by grasping objects with the thumb and all four fingers.
Fine Motor Skills
Most of your hand movements require visual input. Hand- eye coordination is particularly important for fine motor skills. Fine motor skills are muscular movements involved with activities like grasping objects between your thumb and finger or using your lips and tongue to taste things. According to Healthofchildren.com, the pincer grip is a fine motor skill that you develop around your first birthday. The pincer grip involves holding objects between your thumb and forefinger.
Visually Guided Reach System
A 2004 article in the "Journal of Neurophysiology" reports that hand-eye coordination activities incorporate a visually guided reach system. Eye movements are the slave component of your hand-eye coordination activities, because eye movements do not directly affect your body movements. Your eyes are constantly in motion and provide only visual cues to help guide your body movement for hand-eye coordination tasks. Brain activity directs your hand-eye coordination, because neurological processes interpret visual information to guide your behavior.
Improving
Exercises may help to improve your hand-eye coordination. Play catch with a friend. Gradually increase the distance between you and your friend to improve your hand-eye coordination. Write letters or designs on different parts of the ball to provide a focus-point. Call out the last letter you see as you catch the ball. You can also play catch by yourself by throwing a ball straight up in the air and catching it. Throw the ball higher and higher as you progress.
Behavioral Vision Therapy
Eyecareamerica.org suggests that integration between your visual and motor systems influences cognitive skills like reading, writing and daily motor activities. Behavioral vision therapy emphasizes training your eye movements and hand-eye coordination to improve your motor memory activities and your ability to learn. Evidence for the hand-eye coordination and learning improvements from behavioral vision therapy is inconsistent, but this treatment may provide an adjunct treatment for people with learning disabilities, speech and language disorders or nonverbal learning disorders.
