Visual–motor integration, visual perception and motor coordination in a population with Williams syndrome and in typically developing children

Abstract

Background Williams syndrome (WS) is characterised by severe deficits in visual–spatial abilities in contrast to relatively well‐developed language abilities. There is very limited knowledge about visual–motor integration (VMI) in people with WS. Method Twenty‐six participants with WS aged 6 to 41 years were assessed with all three tests of the Beery‐VMI test, namely the VMI test, the visual perception test (VP) and the motor coordination test (MC). Their results were compared with those of 154 typically developing children (TD) aged 4 to 12. Results No influence of age on the three tested abilities was found amongst the participants with WS in comparison with the TD children. The participants with WS scored similarly to the 5‐year‐old TD children in all three tasks; their scores on the VMI correlated with the results on the VP and MC tests, which were similar to those of the TD children. Finally, the scores on the non‐verbal intelligence test (Raven Coloured Progressive Matrices) were highly predictive of the scores in the VMI and VP tests and partially explain the variance in the MC scores. Conclusions The present study is the first to use all three tasks of the Beery‐VMI test. For the TD children, the performances on the three subtests did not show the same developmental trajectory. In contrast, the participants with WS did not show the same developmental trajectory. The participants with WS exhibited poor performances on all tasks with scores comparable with the 5‐year‐old TD children. As high correlations between these abilities were observed, improving VP and MC could help the development of VMI, which in turn could improve visual–spatial abilities in individuals with WS.

7q11.23 Microduplication Syndrome: Clinical and Neurobehavioral Profiling

“…Data on visual-motor integration have shown visual-motor skills at borderline level. As far as we know, this is the first study providing this assessment in dup7q11.23 children, differently from WBS, in which visual motor major impairments have been assessed and documented [59,60].…”

Systematic Review of Visual Motor Integration in Children with Developmental Disabilities

“…These findings, however, may not be applicable for all populations. Research investigating children between the ages of four and 12 years old with Williams Syndrome and those of typical development concluded that age impacted VMI scores of children who were typically developing, but not children with Williams syndrome [ 47 ]. Overall, these studies illustrate that age may have varying influences on different populations of children.…”

“…Two studies included children five years and older [43,44]. Three studies investigated performance of children starting at four years of age [45][46][47]. One study included children as young as three years six months [48].…”

Evaluation of the fine motor skills of children with DCD using the digitalised visual‐motor tracking system

“…At present, there is rare research on the visual‐motor coordination with digitalised equipment [9–12]. For example, David et al .…”