The work conducted by Parush, Yochman, Cohen, and Gershon (1998) can be viewed as being positioned on the boundary of the dependence–independence debate.
It supported the hypothesis that visual perception and visual-motor integration could be separate functions in children with a normal development, but not in clumsy children, who were found to have problems in both regards. Compared to a control group, the clumsy children in their research obtained lower values in fine motricity tasks and in visual processing of abstract stimuli (particularly in visual memory and spatial relationship tasks). Parush et al. (1998) explained their data by suggesting that non-motor perceptual ability and visual-motor integration develop
independently when they are undamaged. In contrast, in clumsy children, the two functions are interconnected because an incorrect visual processing causes incorrect motoric forms.