Motor control in children with developmental coordination disorder — Fitts´ paradigm of pointing task performance measurement

According to the survey of American Psychology Association, developmental coordination disorder (DCD) occurs in at least 6% of school-aged children. In Taiwan, the prevalence is about 12 %. Researchers generally agree that perceptual motor problems evident in DCD are, in part, the result of perceptual and cognitive processes, but the limited research available remains inconclusive. This study investigated fine motor skills in children with and without DCD. Twenty four children, aged seven years (+/- six months) with DCD, and twenty four children without DCD, matched for age, body length, body weight and gender, were recruited into this study. Measures of task-directed movements will be analyzed under two conditions (discrete and consecutive types) with three levels of complexity. The movement is requested to be as accurate and fast as possible. The result of this study indicates that the DCD subjects have slower movement in discrete and continuous Fitts´task. In the design of force control, there was no significant difference found between the two groups. During the test of two-fold force control in the middle trial, the average force in the later trials was found significant different from the first and second ones.