Gaze training supports self-organization of movement coordination in children with developmental coordination disorder

Piotr Słowiński,Mark Wilson,Krasimira Tsaneva-Atanasova,Greg Wood,Ginny Coyles,Genevieve Williams,Omid Alizadehkhaiyat,Harun Baldemir,Samuel Vine

doi:10.1038/s41598-018-38204-z

Abstract

Children with developmental coordination disorder (DCD) struggle with the acquisition of coordinated motor skills. This paper adopts a dynamical systems perspective to assess how individual coordination solutions might emerge following an intervention that trained accurate gaze control in a throw and catch task. Kinematic data were collected from six upper body sensors from twenty-one children with DCD, using a 3D motion analysis system, before and after a 4-week training intervention. Covariance matrices between kinematic measures were computed and distances between pairs of covariance matrices calculated using Riemannian geometry. Multidimensional scaling was then used to analyse differences between coordination patterns. The gaze trained group revealed significantly higher total coordination (sum of all the pairwise covariances) following training than a technique-trained control group. While the increase in total coordination also significantly predicted improvement in task performance, the distinct post-intervention coordination patterns for the gaze trained group were not consistent. Additionally, the gaze trained group revealed individual coordination patterns for successful catch attempts that were different from all the coordination patterns before training, whereas the control group did not. Taken together, the results of this interdisciplinary study illustrate how gaze training may encourage the emergence of coordination via self-organization in children with DCD.

Highlights

Children with developmental coordination disorder (DCD) have significant difficulty in acquiring and executing the essential, coordinated motor skills involved in self-care, recreational activities, and academic performance compared to their typically developing counterparts[1]
The intervention itself is grounded in research that has demonstrated that the quiet eye (QE)7 - an objective measure of visuomotor control in targeting and interception tasks - can be trained, with significant benefits for performance[8,9]
In the QE trained group, we found a significant increase in absolute values of covariance in 10 out of the 15 pairs of measures, while there was no such increase in the technique-trained (TT) control group

Summary

Introduction

Children with developmental coordination disorder (DCD) have significant difficulty in acquiring and executing the essential, coordinated motor skills involved in self-care (e.g., dressing), recreational activities (e.g., ball skills), and academic performance (e.g., handwriting) compared to their typically developing counterparts[1]. Proficient children revealed longer QE pursuit tracking durations – locating the ball more quickly and tracking it for longer - prior to more accurate catch attempts This finding was not wholly surprising, as a body of evidence has linked DCD to significant impairments in general visuomotor control and the processing of task-relevant, visual information[11]; the ability to use predictive information to guide action[12]; and the pursuit tracking of objects[13]. Any variability in response to treatment is seen as a limitation of the generalizability of the intervention, as opposed to potential individualised solutions to the problem This limitation is in turn related to the fact that few studies take a dynamical systems perspective to the self-organisation of movement under constraints[6,17,18,19]. While end point variability may be evidence of poor task performance, coordinative variability is associated with multiple ways of achieving the task goal via exploration of the perceptual-motor space[22,23]

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