Associate Professor Satoshi Shinsako of Kio University, Associate Professor Atsushi Fumi of Rikkyo University, and Professor Akio Nakai of Mukogawa Women's University have found that children with developmental coordination disorder (DCD) have typical development in ``sensitivity to the perception of regularity in actions and results.'' (TD) children.
DCD is a type of neurodevelopmental disorder that occurs in 5% to 6% of school-aged children.Symptoms range from being unable to write clearly, tying shoelaces, bumping into things or people while walking, and being unable to stand on one leg, which significantly impairs the acquisition and execution of coordination skills.
On the other hand, the ability to perceive regular relationships between one's own movements and their results is called ``perception of regularity between actions and results,'' and TD children acquire this ability early in their development.Sensitivity to the perception of regularity between actions and results has been shown to improve developmentally with increasing age, suggesting that it may be related to children's acquisition of motor variety.This suggests that children with DCD, who are characterized by clumsiness in movement, may also have problems in perceiving the regularity of actions and results, but no studies have investigated this to date.
Therefore, this time, we asked 6 DCD children aged 15 to 20 years and 20 TD children of the same age and gender to perform an action-result regularity detection task, and quantitatively assessed the perceived sensitivity of the regularity between actions and results. evaluated.The results revealed that children with DCD had decreased sensitivity to the perception of regularity between actions and outcomes compared to children with TD.Comparing the results by age, we found that there was a marked decline in perceptual sensitivity, especially in younger DCD children (6 to 10 years old).Furthermore, we found that decreased sensitivity to the perception of action-outcome regularity in children with DCD was correlated with decreased performance in several coordination skills, such as ball skills.
From the above, children with DCD have a decreased sensitivity to the regularity of actions and results from a young age (early developmental stage), which leads to the diversification of movements and the brain's adaptive motor control and motor learning systems. The study suggests that the development of certain internal models may be inhibited, resulting in a decline in coordination skills.
It is said that more than half of children with DCD continue to have difficulty with coordination even into adolescence and adulthood.The results of this research are expected to contribute to understanding the pathology of DCD and developing effective rehabilitation techniques, which are one of the most pressing issues in neurorehabilitation research.
Paper information:[Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders] Action-outcome Regularity Perceptual Sensitivity in Children with Developmental Coordination Disorder
