Brief Report: Response inhibition and processing speed in children with motor difficulties and developmental coordination disorder

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Bernardi, M.; Leonard, Hayley C.; Hill, Elisabeth L. and Henry, L.A.. 2016. Brief Report: Response inhibition and processing speed in children with motor difficulties and developmental coordination disorder. Child Neuropsychology, 22(5), pp. 627-634. ISSN 0929-7049 [Article]

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Official URL: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/092970...

Abstract or Description

A previous study reported that children with poor motor skills, classified as having motor difficulties (MD) or Developmental Coordination Disorder (DCD), produced more errors in a motor response inhibition task compared to typically-developing (TD) children, but did not differ in verbal inhibition errors. The present study investigated whether these groups differed in the length of time they took to respond in order to achieve these levels of accuracy, and whether any differences in response speed could be explained by generally slow information processing in children with poor motor skills. Timing data from the Verbal Inhibition Motor Inhibition test were analyzed to identify differences in performance between the groups on verbal and motor inhibition, as well as on processing speed measures from standardized batteries. Although children with MD and DCD produced more errors in the motor inhibition task than TD children, the current analyses found that they did not take longer to complete the task. Children with DCD were slower at inhibiting verbal responses than TD children, while the MD group seemed to perform at an intermediate level between the other groups in terms of verbal inhibition speed. Slow processing speed did not account for these group differences. Results extended previous research into response inhibition in children with poor motor skills by explicitly comparing motor and verbal responses, and suggesting that slow performance, even when accurate, may be attributable to an inefficient way of inhibiting responses, rather than slow information processing speed per se.

Item Type:

Article

Identification Number (DOI):

https://doi.org/10.1080/09297049.2015.1014898

Additional Information:

This work was supported by The Waterloo Foundation [Grant no. 1121/1555], awarded to L. Henry at London South Bank University.

Keywords:

response inhibition, processing speed, motor difficulties, Developmental Coordination Disorder, executive function, dyspraxia

Departments, Centres and Research Units:

Psychology

Dates: