Grant: Project Grant

Developmental Coordination Disorder (DCD) affects 5-6% of school-aged children and is characterized by difficulties in activities of daily living. These children are of normal intelligence but show slow and inaccurate gross and/or fine motor movements. Without intervention, the deficits continue into adulthood in the majority of cases. This population is at high risk to develop anxiety, depression, and obesity; these children are at generally increased risk for physical and mental health problems because DCD affects children's ability to interact socially. One of the core deficits in DCD is poor motor timing. Rhythms and timing are fundamental to biological organisms. In humans, breathing, heart beats, walking, and perceiving speech and music rely on the ability to extract timing regularities in auditory signals and/or to produce regular movements. Remediation treatments for DCD have focused on movement therapies. However, recent work from our group and others on understanding how time and rhythm information is processed in the brain shows that the perception of auditory rhythms is accomplished through interactions between auditory and motor (movement) areas of the brain. Simply hearing an auditory rhythm sets up oscillatory brain rhythms we can measure with electroencephalography (EEG) involving both auditory and motor regions. Thus, we hypothesized, and pilot data corroborated, that children with DCD also show timing deficits in the perception of sounds. The research program aims to (1) understand these auditory perceptual deficits in DCD from both a brain and behavioural perspective and (2) investigate benefits of adding auditory rhythmic cuing to existing movement-training therapies to improve outcomes. The research is significant in furthering our understanding of sensorimotor timing deficits underlying DCD and applying this knowledge to improve treatment programs.