How does the neural control of manual movements mature from childhood to adulthood? Here, we investigated developmental differences in functional corticomuscular connectivity using coherence techniques in 91 individuals recruited from four different age groups covering the age range 8-30y. EEG and EMG was recorded while participants performed a unimanual visual force-tracing task requiring fine control of the force produced in a precision grip with both the dominant and non-dominant hand. Using

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... beamforming methods, we reconstructed source activity from EEG data displaying peak coherence with the active FDI muscle during the task in order to assess functional corticomuscular connectivity. Our results revealed that coherence was greater in adolescents and adults than in children and that the difference in coherence between children and adults was driven by the descending (cortex-to-muscle) component of coherence. This was paralleled by the finding of a posterior to anterior shift in the cortical sources displaying peak corticomuscular coherence within the contralateral hemisphere from late adolescence. Finally, we observed that corticomuscular coherence was higher on the non-dominant compared to the dominant hand across age groups. These findings provide a detailed characterization of differences in task-related corticomuscular connectivity at different stages of typical ontogenetic development that may be related to the maturational refinement of manual motor control.