The effects of a visuo-motor and cognitive dual task on walking adaptability in children with and without Developmental Coordination Disorder

Motor and cognitive dual-task performance under low and high task complexity in children with and without developmental coordination disorder

“…The dual-task efficiency score in the present study was lowest for the combination of the pegboard task (i.e., relatively high complexity) and the cycling task (i.e., concurrent motor task). This is in line with the multiple resource theory of attention (Wickens, 1984) and previous studies that included both a concurrent cognitive and a concurrent motor task (Cherng et al, 2009;Jelsma et al, 2021;Kuijpers et al, 2022). Our results thus indicate that the previous findings from studies including balance tasks, can also be applied to manual dexterity tasks.…”

“…Also, Przysucha et al (2016) and Jelsma et al (2021) did not find group differences in dual-task interference using a static and dynamic balance task, respectively. This indicates that while the majority of studies found that children with DCD had a stronger decline in performance from single-task to dual-task than TD children (Chen et al, 2012(Chen et al, , 2011Cherng et al, 2009;Kuijpers et al, 2022;Laufer et al, 2008;Tsai et al, 2009), it seems that dual-task performance is not necessarily impaired in children with DCD. That is, in line with the multi-component account described in Wilson et al (2017), dual-task performance seems to be highly dependent on task and environmental constraints.…”

“…An overview of these studies can be found in Table 1. Some studies found that the performance of children with DCD was more affected compared with that of their TD peers under dual-task conditions (e.g., Chen & Tsai, 2016;Chen et al, 2012;Chen et al, 2011;Cherng et al, 2009;Kuijpers et al, 2022;Laufer et al, 2008;Schott et al, 2016;Tsai et al, 2009). Conversely, other studies found no differences between children with DCD and TD children with respect to their performance on dual-tasks (e.g., Biotteau et al, 2015;Jelsma et al, 2021;Przysucha et al, 2016).…”

“…There are three studies that evaluated the effects of both a concurrent cognitive and a concurrent motor task (Cherng et al, 2009;Jelsma et al, 2021;Kuijpers et al, 2022). In the study of Jelsma et al (2021) it was found that children improved on the primary balance task when it was combined with a cognitive task, while children decreased in their performance when it was combined with a motor task.…”

“…This change from single-task to dual-task performance did not differ between children with and without DCD. Cherng et al (2009) and Kuijpers et al (2022) both used a walking task and found that the performance on this task was affected by the concurrent motor task in children with DCD more so than their TD peers. This effect was not found when a concurrent cognitive task was added.…”