Fine motor skills and mental imagery: Is it all in the mind?

Previous work has indicated that children's fine motor skills (FMS) contribute to cognitive performance in a number of domains. A philosophically and scientifically central aspect of cognitive skill is the ability to mentally simulate external events; however, very little research has examined whether FMS relate to mental imagery. Children aged 35-129 months (N = 294) were administered measures of FMS and mental imagery. Control variables included working memory, vocabulary, visual closure, chronological age, and a vast array of stimulus lexical features. Multilevel linear models indicated that FMS uniquely predicted mental imagery abilities, as did visual closure, chronological age, and various lexical features, whereas working memory and vocabulary did not. Findings are taken to support the idea that both mental imagery and FMS share, in part, similar functional systems.