Cognitive, perceptual, and motor profiles of school-aged children with developmental coordination disorder

Abstract

Developmental coordination disorder (DCD) is a heterogeneous condition. Besides motor impairments, children with DCD often exhibit poor visual perceptual skills and executive functions. This study aimed to characterize the motor, perceptual, and cognitive profiles of children with DCD at the group level and in terms of subtypes. A total of 50 children with DCD and 31 typically developing (TD) peers (7–11 years old) underwent a comprehensive neuropsychological (15 tests) and motor (three subscales of the Movement Assessment Battery for Children-2) assessment. The percentage of children with DCD showing impairments in each measurement was first described. Hierarchical agglomerative and K-means iterative partitioning clustering analyses were then performed to distinguish the subtypes present among the complete sample of children (DCD and TD) in a data-driven way. Moderate to large percentages of children with DCD showed impaired executive functions (92%) and praxis (meaningless gestures and postures, 68%), as well as attentional (52%), visual perceptual (46%), and visuomotor (36%) skills. Clustering analyses identified five subtypes, four of them mainly consisting of children with DCD and one of TD children. These subtypes were characterized by: (i) generalized impairments (8 children with DCD), (ii) impaired manual dexterity, poor balance (static/dynamic), planning, and alertness (15 DCD and 1 TD child), (iii) impaired manual dexterity, cognitive inhibition, and poor visual perception (11 children with DCD), (iv) impaired manual dexterity and cognitive inhibition (15 DCD and 5 TD children), and (v) no impairment (25 TD and 1 child with DCD). Besides subtle differences, the motor and praxis measures did not enable to discriminate between the four subtypes of children with DCD. The subtypes were, however, characterized by distinct perceptual or cognitive impairments. These results highlight the importance of assessing exhaustively the perceptual and cognitive skills of children with DCD.

Motor Skills and Visual Deficits in Developmental Coordination Disorder: A Narrative Review

“…A total of 7 articles addressed the motor skills of children with DCD with some involvement of the visual system [9,10,[20][21][22][23][24]. Another 8 articles addressed the visual characteristics of children with DCD [25][26][27][28][29][30][31][32].…”

“…Table 1 shows the specific characteristics of the selected studies, such as the type of study, the variable studied, and other relevant data. A total of 17 selected articles were descriptive studies, although some did not specify it [4,[7][8][9][10]21,23,[27][28][29][30][32][33][34][35]37,38,44]. Another 18 were experimental, including the RTCs [5,22,26,31,[39][40][41][42][43][45][46][47][48][49][50][51][52][53].…”

“…Seven studies examine the motor characteristics of children with DCD [9,10,[20][21][22][23][24]. Children with DCD have fine and/or gross motor skills below the level expected for their age and learning opportunities [9].…”

“…Seven studies examine the motor characteristics of children with DCD [9,10,[20][21][22][23][24]. Children with DCD have fine and/or gross motor skills below the level expected for their age and learning opportunities [9]. According to the diagnostic criteria of the DSM-V [3], people with DCD acquire motor coordination below expectations for their chronological age and present clumsiness, inaccuracy in the performance of motor skills or slowness.…”

“…Deficits are evident for dual tasks and tasks that require greater temporal or spatial precision, or a more complex planning that requires some adaptation/adjustment at the perceptual-motor level to maintain stability [2]. In addition to motor impairments, which may affect all motor skills or only some motor skills [4][5][6], the literature reports other frequent impairments, such as visual [1,7,8], cognitive [9][10][11] and reduced executive functions [1,12].…”