Postural adaptations to a suprapostural memory task among children with and without developmental coordination disorder

Abstract

AIM The present study investigated the effects of varying the cognitive demands of a memory task (a suprapostural task) while recording postural motion on two groups of children, one diagnosed with developmental coordination disorder (DCD) and an age-matched group of typically developing children.METHOD Two groups, each comprising 38 child volunteers (21 males, 17 females) aged 9 to 10 years, participated in the study. Each child performed a digital memory task at two levels of difficulty, low and high. Positional variability (standard deviation of position) of the head and torso were recorded as the biomechanical responses to the variation in task difficulty.RESULTS Both groups significantly reduced postural motion when engaged in the high-difficulty condition (p<0.05) compared with the low-difficulty condition. Children with DCD exhibited significantly higher levels of postural motion (p<0.05) than the typically developing children. The typically developing children significantly reduced their postural motion in the high-difficulty condition (p<0.05) compared with the low-difficulty condition, whereas children with DCD did not.

Cognitive and neuroimaging findings in developmental coordination disorder: new insights from a systematic review of recent research

“…Children with DCD were less able to complete a dual task while maintaining stability, even when the secondary task was cognitive. Unlike typically developing children, they failed to dampen postural sway when performing an aiming task with high accuracy demands .…”

Balance control in individuals with developmental coordination disorder: A systematic review and meta-analysis

“…Three studies were excluded because of low methodological quality [39,40,62]. The data extracted from 17 studies [10,21,[23][24][25][31][32][33][34][35]37,41,42,[45][46][47][48] could be pooled for meta-analyses, because they reported identical outcome variables for the same task. The selection process' flowchart is shown in Appendix 3.…”

Neural Oscillation Reveals Deficits in Visuospatial Working Memory in Children With Developmental Coordination Disorder

“…However, based on the definition in DSM–V (American Psychiatric Association, ), lower IQ is not a core feature of DCD. Indeed, many previous studies also observed similar IQ scores between TD children and those with DCD (e.g., Biotteau, Chaix, & Albaret, ; Chen, Tsai, Stoffregen, Chang, & Wade, ), and this is also true when DCD children showing poorer cognitive functions (Tsai et al., ; Wilson & Maruff, ; Wilson, Maruff, & McKenzie, ). Moreover, research has demonstrated that TD and DCD differences in cognitive functions cannot be explained by IQ scores (e.g., Alloway, ).…”