Abstract
People commonly use pre-cue information to advance and reduce the information processing time required for a motor task (e.g., motor planning). However, children with developmental coordination disorder (DCD) exhibit difficulties performing pre-cued goal-directed tasks. The purpose of the present study was to investigate the use of valid, neutral, and invalid pre-cue information for a goal-directed task. The participants were 11 children with DCD (mean age = 7.94 yrs.) and 11 typically developed (TD) age- and gender-matched children. The children with DCD exhibited delayed motor planning (e.g., reaction time) under the invalid condition compared to that of the TD children. The children with DCD used atypical strategies for motor execution and depended more on online corrections (e.g., increased deceleration time and movement units) to reach the target. These results suggest that children with DCD have difficulties handling unpredictable situations and that the use of atypical motor execution strategies did not affect movement time.
Highlights
People use external cues to perform many motor actions
reaction time (RT) of the children with developmental coordination disorder (DCD) was significantly longer under the invalid pre-cue condition than that of the typically developed (TD) children (p = 0.03). These results indicate that children with DCD take more time than TD children to plan movement when invalid information is presented in advance (Fig. 2)
The results show that children with DCD exhibited increasing deficiencies as a function of condition complexity from the valid to the invalid pre-cue conditions
Summary
The use of pre-external cues, or pre-cues, consists of obtaining information available in the environment to advance particular neural motor planning processes for goal-directed actions[1]. Using pre-cue information in preparation to perform a motor action reduces the demand for information processing during motor planning [e.g., reaction time (RT)], motor execution [e.g., movement time (MT)], and online corrections because using good available pre-cue information can make the motor responses less dependent on external feedback and enable the central nervous system to process new information[3]. Woodworth[4] published an extensive analysis and review of human-produced targeted movements. He proposed a two-component model consisting of an initial impulse phase and an online control phase. Changes from movement deceleration to acceleration and vice versa occur based on the number of “movement units” (MU) corresponding to the number of required corrections
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