School of Psychology, University of Surrey, Guildford, Surrey, United Kingdom.
Centre for Multimedia Teaching and Learning, Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg, Halle, Germany.
PLoS One. 2020 Nov 9;15(11):e0232562. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0232562. eCollection 2020.
Children with Developmental Coordination Disorder (DCD) are diagnosed based on motor difficulties. However, they also exhibit difficulties in several other cognitive domains, including visuospatial processing, executive functioning and attention. One account of the difficulties seen in DCD proposes an impairment in internal forward modelling, i.e., the ability to (i) detect regularities of a repetitive perceptual or motor pattern, (ii) predict future outcomes of motor actions, and (iii) adapt behaviour accordingly. Using electroencephalographic recordings, the present study aimed to delineate these different aspects of internal forward modelling across several domains. To this end, 24 children with DCD and 23 typically-developing children (aged 7-10 years) completed a serial prediction task in the visual, temporal, spatial and motor domains. This task required them to learn short sequences and to indicate whether a sequence was disrupted towards its end. Analyses revealed that, across all domains, children with DCD showed poorer discrimination between intact and disrupted sequences, accompanied by a delayed late parietal positivity elicited by disrupted sequences. These results indicate an impairment in explicit sequence discrimination in DCD across motor and cognitive domains. However, there is no evidence for an impairment in implicit performance on the visuomotor task in DCD. These results suggest an impairment of the updating of an internal forward model in DCD resulting in a blurred representation of that model and, consequently, in a reduced ability to detect regularities in the environment (e.g., sequences). Such a detailed understanding of internal forward modelling in DCD could help to explain the wide range of co-occurring difficulties experienced by those with a diagnosis of DCD.
患有发育性协调障碍(DCD)的儿童根据运动困难进行诊断。然而,他们在其他几个认知领域也表现出困难,包括视空间处理、执行功能和注意力。一种对 DCD 中所见困难的解释提出了内部前向建模的损伤,即(i)检测重复感知或运动模式的规律,(ii)预测运动动作的未来结果,以及(iii)相应地调整行为的能力。本研究使用脑电图记录,旨在跨多个领域描绘内部前向建模的这些不同方面。为此,24 名患有 DCD 的儿童和 23 名发育正常的儿童(7-10 岁)完成了视觉、时间、空间和运动领域的序列预测任务。该任务要求他们学习短序列,并指示序列在其末尾是否中断。分析表明,在所有领域中,患有 DCD 的儿童在完整和中断序列之间的区分能力较差,并且中断序列引起的后期顶叶正波延迟。这些结果表明 DCD 中存在跨运动和认知领域的明确序列辨别障碍。然而,没有证据表明 DCD 中的视觉运动任务存在内隐表现受损。这些结果表明 DCD 中内部前向模型的更新受损,导致该模型的表示模糊,从而降低了检测环境中规律(例如序列)的能力。对 DCD 中内部前向建模的这种详细理解可以帮助解释那些被诊断为 DCD 的人所经历的广泛的并发困难。