Touch interaction for children aged 3 to 6 years: Experimental findings and relationship to motor skills

• Published in: International journal of human-computer studies 2015-02, Vol.74, p.54-76
• Main Authors: Vatavu, Radu-Daniel, Cramariuc, Gabriel, Schipor, Doina Maria
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Children; Cognitive developmental stages; Interface design; Motor skills; Multi-touch; Piaget׳s theory; Sensorimotor evaluation; Smart phone; Tablet; Touch interaction; Touch-screen
• ISSN: 1071-5819; 1095-9300
• DOI: 10.1016/j.ijhcs.2014.10.007

Our present understanding of young children׳s touch-screen performance is still limited, as only few studies have considered analyzing children׳s touch interaction patterns so far. In this work, we address children aged between 3 and 6 years old during their preoperational stage according to Piaget׳s cognitive developmental theory, and we report their touch-screen performance with standard tap and drag and drop interactions on smart phones and tablets. We show significant improvements in children׳s touch performance as they grow from 3 to 6 years, and point to performance differences between children and adults. We correlate children׳s touch performance expressed with task completion times and target acquisition accuracy with sensorimotor evaluations that characterize children׳s finger dexterity and graphomotor and visuospatial processing abilities, and report significant correlations. Our observations are drawn from the largest children touch dataset available in the literature, consisting in data collected from 89 children and an additional 30 young adults to serve as comparison. We use our findings to recommend guidelines for designing touch-screen interfaces for children by adopting the new perspective of sensorimotor abilities. We release our large dataset into the interested community for further studies on children׳s touch input behavior. It is our hope that our findings on the little-studied age group of 3- to 6-year-olds together with the companion dataset will contribute toward a better understanding of children׳s touch interaction behavior and toward improved touch interface designs for small-age children. •We investigate small-age children׳s touch performance on smart phones and tablets.•Children׳s touch performance improves significantly from 3 to 6 years.•We discuss findings in terms of Piaget׳s preoperational developmental stage.•We recommend design guidelines by considering children׳s sensorimotor skills.•Dataset released for the largest children touch-screen study up to date (89 children).