The Effect of a Dual Task Condition on the Postural Control in Children with Developmental Coordination Disorder: Visual Spatial Working Memory vs Auditory Working Memory

Abstract

It is very common to do two tasks at the same time in daily living such as talking while driving listening to music while walking Doing two tasks at the same time is called dual task Postural control used to be considered as an automatic process However many studies have shown that postural control needs attention especially in the elderly and persons with Parkinson’s diseases Such information is limited in children and furthermore less in children with developmental coordination disorder (DCD) DCD refer to the difficulty in motor coordination and such difficulty cannot be explained by any general medical condition Difficulty of motor skill and high variability of motor performance are main characteristics of children with DCD Research results of the effects on the standing postural control in children with DCD are inconsistent Some results show that performing a concurrent cognitive task will impair the postural control in children with DCD but some show the opposite results The concurrent cognitive task may be a visual-spatial working memory task or an auditory working memory task The effects may also be different Therefore the purpose of this research is to examine the effect of a dual task condition on the standing postural control in children with DCD Twenty children with DCD and 20 typically developing (TD) children participated in the study Two types of concurrent working memory tasks: visual spatial and auditory and two kind of standing conditions: standard stance and tandem stance were the experiment tasks The performance of standing postural control task was expressed with the velocity and trajectory of center of the pressure (COP) The cognitive task performance was expressed by accuracy and reaction time We used the dual task costs (performance in dual task condition minus performance in single task condition) as the dependent variables for analyses The results showed that there was group effect of dual task cost and such effect was affected by standing postures but not affected by working memory tasks That is children with DCD showed worse standing stability in tandem stance condition while concurrently performing a working memory task but TD children had better standing stability while concurrently performing a working memory task However such effect was not different between performing a visual spatial task and performing an auditory task In conclusion children with DCD showed worse standing stability in dual task condition; TD children showed better standing stability in dual task condition Dual task condition may enhance the attention in TD children but not in children with DCD

Date of Award	2016 Feb 15
Original language	English
Supervisor	Rong-Ju Cherng (Supervisor)