What is hand-eye coordination?
Hand-eye coordination, or eye-hand coordination, is the ability to do activities that require the simultaneous use of our hands and eyes, like an activity that uses the information our eyes perceive (visual spatial perception) to guide our hands to carry out a movement.
- We use our eyes to direct attention to a stimulus and help the brain understand where the body is located in space (self-perception).
- We use our hands to simultaneously carry out a determined task based on the visual information our eyes receive
Eye-hand coordination is a complex cognitive ability, as it calls for us to unite our visual and motor skills, allowing for the hand to be guided by the visual stimulation our eyes receive. Hand-eye coordination is especially important for normal child development and academic success, but is also an important skill that adults use in countless activities on a daily basis.
Most activities that you do in your day-to-day life use some degree of eye-hand coordination, which is why it’s important to ensure that it is as developed as possible. Generally speaking, we use visual information to correct a behavior that isn’t appropriate for a situation, which is one of the reasons why this cognitive skill is so important.
