Abstract
Cognitive deficits have been commonly observed in children with developmental coordination disorder (DCD), including memory, attention, and executive function difficulties. The present study evaluates the specific cognitive deficits in Chinese children with DCD, through a number of tests. A total of 401 children aged 7 to 10 years old from primary schools in Guangdong Province, China, participated in this study. Using the guidelines of the Movement Assessment Battery for Children (“Movement ABC-2”), a measurement tool of motor function ability, the children were divided into a DCD group, a group identified as being at risk of DCD, and a normal control group. The results of our analysis revealed that children’s overall motor abilities could predict their overall cognitive ability, reaction time, memory, and attention. The performance of the DCD children was worse than that of the other two groups in terms of reaction time. The DCD group also returned lower scores for executive function than the normal control group did. A regression analysis showed that the cognitive deficits in children with DCD center mainly on poor executive function rather than attention and memory issues. These findings provide preliminary results regarding the cognitive deficits in Chinese children with DCD and have potential applications for the diagnosis and treatment of the disorder.
Highlights
Movement development corresponds to other basic abilities and has attracted much attention from researchers as well as health-care providers
The results suggest that there is a significant correlation between children’s movement development levels and the total scores from the cognitive tests, a finding that is consistent with the relationships identified between the children’s movement development levels and individual cognitive tests
The total score for movement development is largely correlated with the scores of reaction time, executive function, memory, and attention tasks
Summary
Movement development corresponds to other basic abilities and has attracted much attention from researchers as well as health-care providers. Previous studies have labeled children’s movement difficulties as clumsiness, dyspraxia, motor learning difficulties, or as a disorder of attention, motor control, and perception (“DAMP”). These concepts explain children’s problems with movement or the acquisition of movement from different perspectives [1,2,3,4,5]. With the development of brain and cognitive neuroscience research, though, it has been discovered that DCD is not just relevant to the movement system, but is related to a complex series of neurological dysfunctions involving memory, attention, executive
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