Inhibition difficulties in preterm children: Developmental delay or persistent deficit?

Among executive functions (EFs), research has highlighted specific inhibition difficulties in preterm children. The present paper reviews and classifies the studies that assessed response inhibition and interference control abilities in preterm children and adolescents aged 3 to 16 years. Most behavioral studies agree on a developmental delay at early school age in inhibition abilities and a catch-up before adolescence, with lesser response inhibition difficulties at pre-adolescence. However, persisting interference control difficulties have been reported into early adulthood. These results are discussed, along with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) findings. Finally, this paper outlines methodological issues that need to be overcome in order to define the developmental trajectory of inhibition abilities in the preterm population.     

The development of rapid online control in children aged 6–12 years: Reaching performance

Rapid online control during reaching has an important bearing on movement accuracy and flexibility. It is surprising then that few studies have investigated the development of rapid online control in children. In this study, we were particularly interested in age-related changes in the nature of motor control in response to visual perturbation. We compared the performance of younger (6–7 years of age), mid-aged (8–9), and older (10–12) children, as well as healthy young adults using a double-step reaching task. Participants were required to make target-directed reaching movements in near space, while also responding to visual perturbations that occurred at movement onset for a small percentage of trials. Results showed that both the older and mid-aged children corrected their reaching in response to the unexpected shifts in target location significantly faster than younger children, manifest by reduced time to correction. In turn, the responses of adults were faster than older children in terms of movement time and on kinematic measures such as time to correction and time to peak velocity. These results indicate that the capacity to utilize forward estimates of limb position in the service of online control of early perturbations to ballistic (or rapid) reaching develops in a non-linear fashion, progressing rapidly between early and middle childhood, showing a degree of stability over mid and later childhood, but then evidence for continued refinement between childhood and young adulthood. The pattern of change after childhood and into early adolescence requires further investigation, particularly during the rapid phase of physical growth that accompanies puberty.     

Longitudinal patterns of change in eye–hand coordination in children aged 8–16 years

Enhanced eye–hand coordination (EHC) is associated with greater participation in physical activity. No longitudinal studies have examined the change in throw–catch EHC from childhood to mid-adolescence. We investigated the development of EHC with an object control test from childhood to mid-adolescence in boys and girls. Evaluated at age 8, 10, 12 and 16 years, EHC was measured as the aggregate success rate of a throw and wall-rebound catch test. The test involved 40 attempts of progressive increasing difficulty, as determined by increased distances from a wall and transitions from two-handed to one-handed catches. Outcomes were treated as quasi-binomial and modelled by generalised linear mixed logistic regression analysis. EHC improved with age from childhood to mid-adolescence, although boys were more adept at each age (p < 0.001). The patterns of change in EHC with increasing age varied according to the degree of difficulty of the task (p < 0.001); throw and two-handed catch proficiency developing earlier than throw and one-handed catch in both sexes. Boys’ EHC was better than girls’ as early as age 8 years and male proficiency was maintained through to mid-adolescence. The proficiency of throw and two-handed catch rates developed faster than throw and one-handed catch rates for both sexes.     

Children's understanding of religion: Interviews with Arab-Muslim,Asian-Muslim,Christian and Hindu children aged 5–11 years

Research into children's awareness of group differences has been an active area of research for some time, with work focusing on areas such as nationality, ethnicity, gender and religion. The majority of the work in these areas has taken the cognitive-constructivist framework as a background, offering a domain-general approach to all social cognition. This paper reports a qualitative study investigating children's understanding of religion and the importance of religion, broadly following an interview schedule based on Verbit's (1970 Verbit, MF. 1970. “The components and dimensions of religious behaviour: Toward a reconceptualisation of religiosity”. In American Mosaic, Edited by: Hammond, PE and Johnson, B. 124–139. New York: Random House. (Eds.) [Google Scholar]) definition of religion. A semi-structured interview procedure was used with 58 Arab Muslim, Asian Muslim, Christian, and Hindu children aged between 5 and 11 years living in North London. Religion appeared to be highly salient to the children interviewed, and findings suggested that children's religious identity is subject to a complex pattern of influences which cannot be solely explained by either age or cognitive differences.     

Training children aged 5–10 years in manual compliance control to improve drawing and handwriting

A large proportion of school-aged children exhibit poor drawing and handwriting. This prevalence limits the availability of therapy. We developed an automated method for training improved manual compliance control and relatedly, prospective control of a stylus. The approach included a difficult training task, while providing parametrically modifiable support that enables the children to perform successfully while developing good compliance control. The task was to use a stylus to push a bead along a 3D wire path. Support was provided by making the wire magnetically attractive to the stylus. Support was progressively reduced as 3D tracing performance improved. We report studies that (1) compared performance of Typically Developing (TD) children and children with Developmental Coordination Disorder (DCD), (2) tested training with active versus passive movement, (3) tested progressively reduced versus constant or no support during training, (4) tested children of different ages, (5) tested the transfer of training to a drawing task, (6) tested the specificity of training in respect to the size, shape and dimensionality of figures, and (7) investigated the relevance of the training task to the Beery VMI, an inventory used to diagnose DCD. The findings were as follows. (1) Pre-training performance of TD and DCD children was the same and good with high support but distinct and poor with low support. Support yielded good self-efficacy that motivated training. Post training performance with no support was improved and the same for TD and DCD children. (2) Actively controlled movements were required for improved performance. (3) Progressively reduced support was required for good performance during and after training. (4) Age differences in performance during pre-training were eliminated post-training. (5) Improvements transferred to drawing. (6) There was no evidence of specificity of training in transfer. (7) Disparate Beery scores were reflected in pre-training but not post-training performance. We conclude that the method improves manual compliance control, and more generally, prospective control of movements used in drawing performance.     

Does the Animal Fun program improve social-emotional and behavioural outcomes in children aged 4–6 years?

Animal Fun was designed to enhance motor and social development in young children. Its efficacy in improving motor skills was presented previously using a randomised controlled trial and a multivariate nested cohort design. Based on the Environmental Stress Hypothesis, it was argued that the program would also result in positive mental health outcomes, investigated in the current study. Pre-intervention scores were recorded for 511 children aged 4.83–6.17 years (M = 5.42, SD = .30). Intervention and control groups were compared 6 months following intervention, and again in their first school year. Changes in teacher-rated prosocial behaviour and total difficulties were assessed using the Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire, and data analysed using Generalised Linear Mixed Models. There was a significant improvement in prosocial behaviour of children in the intervention group six months after initial testing, which remained at 18-month follow-up. Total difficulties decreased at 6 months for the intervention group, with no change at 18 months. This effect was present only for the hyperactivity/inattention subscale. The only significant change for the control group was an increase in hyperactivity/inattention scores from pre-intervention to 18-month follow-up. The Animal Fun program appears to be effective in improving social and behavioural outcomes.     

The Stroop test: A developmental study in a French children sample aged 7 to 12 years

The Stroop test is a commonly used task in psychology to assess executive function and more specifically inhibition. International studies consistently show improved Stroop task performance with age, whereas available French normative data displays the opposite pattern, with poor clinical sensibility (Albaret & Migliore, 1999). To provide an alternative and useful Stroop test for children, we examined developmental data based on a well-known French protocol validated in adult (GREFEX study group, 2001). The three-standard conditions of the Stroop task (i.e. naming, reading and interference) were administered to 120 typically developing school children (7–12 years), while taking into account the effects of gender, parental educational level and intelligence (both crystallized and fluid intelligence, as measured by the Wechsler intelligence scale). The time to complete each condition (in seconds) was recorded, as well as the number of uncorrected and corrected errors. Results show a continuous increase of performance in “reading” and “naming” control conditions between 7 and 12 years, suggesting an improvement in the lexical access speed and the automation of decoding abilities during reading. Most importantly, a significant reduction of time Stroop effect with age was found (difference between interference and naming conditions), but no interaction with gender. Stroop performances are related to fluid intelligence once age is statistically controlled, but not to parental educational level. The developmental pattern found from the Stroop GREFEX version is consistent with international data and more broadly with executive function and inhibition development. These findings open the prospect of useful normative standardization of this task, with valuable clinical applications perspectives.     

A typology of child behavior profile patterns: distribution and correlates for disturbed children aged 6–16

This article reports the construction of a typology of behavior problem patterns, as scored on the Child Behavior Profile. Hierarchical cluster analysis was used to identify reliable profile patterns that characterize clinically referred boys and girls aged 6–11 and 12–16. Procedures for classifying the profiles of individual children were developed and good agreement was obtained between classifications based on ratings by mothers and a clinician. The distribution of profile patterns was determined for each age and sex group. Children classified by different patterns were found to differ significantly in age, race, school performance, and amount and quality of participation in activities and social relationships. Issues in the application of cluster analysis to behavioral data were analyzed and various options for the classification of individual cases were compared.     

Attentional difficulties in children: Weakness in executive function or problems in coping with difficult tasks?

Two groups of children, one with good attention and one with poor attention, as rated by teachers, carried out a computerized visual search task. There were no differences between groups on an easy search for a single target, but when the task was made more difficult by including foils very similar to the targets or requiring alternating search for two different targets, the poor attention group made significantly more errors than the good attention group. The nature of these increases in errors was examined to discover whether they were due to errors specifically on the foils similar to the targets and errors due to failure to alternate. It was found that as well as making more errors of these types, the children with poor attention also showed a greater increase in other types of error (shape confusions, repetitions etc.) from the simple task to the more difficult ones. It is concluded that these findings do not support an explanation of poor attention solely in terms of weaknesses in specific executive functions, but suggest that supplementary or alternative explanations are needed, for example reduced processing capacity or problems in motivation or arousal when coping with difficult tasks.     

Unique designs,errors and strategies in the Five-Point Test: The contribution of age,phonemic fluency and visuospatial abilities in Italian children aged 6–11 years

Performances on the Five-Point Test of 161 Italian children aged 6 to 11 years were investigated, along with phonemic fluency, visual-motor integration, visual perception, motor coordination, visuospatial memory, and fluid intelligence. Five-Point Test accuracy was significantly related to phonemic fluency and visual-motor integration, while phonemic fluency was linked to motor coordination. The two fluency measures increased linearly with age, but the developmental progression of Five-Point Test accuracy was less influenced by age. Different age effects were also found on the relationship between fluid intelligence and the two fluency measures. The inspection of qualitative aspects of Five-Point Test performance (errors and strategies) suggested that strategy usage enhanced both productivity and accuracy in children; age-related changes were observed in the relationship between the number of errors and the total number of designs produced.     

Working memory deficit in children with mathematical difficulties: a general or specific deficit?

This study examined whether children with mathematical difficulties (MDs) or comorbid mathematical and reading difficulties have a working memory deficit and whether the hypothesized working memory deficit includes the whole working memory system or only specific components. In the study, 31 10-year-olds with MDs and 37 10-year-olds with both mathematical and reading difficulties were compared with 47 age-matched and 50 younger controls (9-year-olds) on a number of working memory tasks. Compared with the age-matched controls, both groups of children with MDs performed worse on tasks tapping the central executive (e.g., visual matrix span) and the phonological loop (e.g., word span). More important, the MD group performed worse than the younger controls on the counting span task, whereas the group with comorbid mathematical and reading difficulties performed worse on the counting span task and the visual matrix span task. These findings provide support for the assumption that children with MDs have a working memory deficit. More specifically, children with MDs have a central executive deficit connected to concurrent processing and storage of numerical and visual information.     

Development of temporal and spatial characteristics of anticipatory postural adjustments during gait initiation in children aged 3–10 years

This study aimed to analyze the development of direction specificities of temporal and spatial control and the coordination pattern of anticipatory postural adjustment (APA) along the anteroposterior (AP) and mediolateral (ML) directions during gait initiation (GI) in children aged 3–10 years. This study included 72 healthy children aged 3–10 years and 14 young adults. The child population was divided into four groups by age: 3–4, 5–6, 7–8, and 9–10 years. The GI task included GI using the dominant limb. The peak center of feet pressure (COP) shifts during APAs (APA_peak), initiation time of COP shifts (APA_onset), and the COP vectors in the horizontal plane were calculated to evaluate the direction specificity of spatial, temporal, and coordination control, respectively. A difference in direction specificity development was found for the APA_peak. The APA_peak in the mediolateral axis, but not in the anteroposterior axis, was significantly higher in the 7–8 years age group than in other groups. Although APA_onset was not found for direction specificity, a significant difference between the adult and children groups (5–6 years, 7–8 years, and 9–10 years) was observed in the direction of the COP vector. In conclusion, the developmental process of the spatial, temporal, and coordination control of APAs during GI varied with age. Furthermore, the spatial control and coordination pattern of APAs was found to be direction specific. All components of APAs, namely temporal and spatial control, coordination pattern, and direction specificities, should be analyzed to capture the developmental process of anticipatory postural control.     

Christian–Muslim Relations in Sub-Saharan Africa: Problems and Prospects

Christian–Muslim relations, even at the best of times, have always been disturbingly marred by suspicion, accusations and counter-accusations over interpretations of history and experiences. This has been further confounded by the very complex nature of the colonial histories on the African continent, where the destruction of existing civilizations, empires and emperors provided the foundation stones for the establishment of the colonial states that later emerged. The article provides insights into some of the major issues that serve as constraints in Christian–Muslim relations in some of the countries in sub-Saharan Africa. It reviews issues of Christian–Muslim relations against the backdrop of the return of democracy in most of sub-Saharan Africa in the last ten or fifteen years and points out some policy issues that African states will need to address to lay a foundation for dialogue.     

Development of the Drooling Infants and Preschoolers Scale (DRIPS) and reference charts for monitoring saliva control in children aged 0–4 years

ObjectivesTo develop and validate a parent questionnaire to quantify drooling severity and frequency in young children (the Drooling Infants and Preschoolers Scale – the DRIPS). To investigate development of saliva control in typically developing young children in the age of 0–4 years. To construct sex-specific reference charts presenting percentile curves for drooling plotted for age to monitor the development of saliva control in infancy and preschool age.Study designThe DRIPS was developed consisting of 20 items to identify severity and frequency of drooling during meaningful daily activities. Factor analysis was performed to test construct validity. A piecewise logistic regression was followed by a piecewise linear regression to construct sex-specific reference charts.ResultsWe obtained 652 completed questionnaires from parents of typically developing children. The factor analysis revealed four discriminating components: drooling during Activities, Feeding, Non nutritive sucking, and Sleep. To illustrate the development of saliva control, eight sex-specific reference curves were constructed to plot the scores of the DRIPS by age group, at the 15th, 50th, 85th and 97th percentile. About 3–15% of the preschoolers in our cohort did not acquire full saliva control at the age of 4 years.ConclusionsWith the DRIPS it is possible to validly compare and visualize the development of saliva control in an individual infant or preschooler and allow clinicians to timely initiate individually targeted interventions if children outperform.     

Does the Animal Fun program improve motor performance in children aged 4–6 years?

The Animal Fun program was designed to enhance the motor ability of young children by imitating the movements of animals in a fun, inclusive setting. The efficacy of this program was investigated through a randomized controlled trial using a multivariate nested cohort design. Pre-intervention scores were recorded for 511 children aged 4.83 years to 6.17 years (M = 5.42 years, SD = 3.58 months). Six control and six intervention schools were compared 6 months later following the intervention, and then again at 18 months after the initial testing when the children were in their first school year. Changes in motor performance were examined using the Bruininks-Oseretsky Test of Motor Proficiency short form. Data were analyzed using multi-level-mixed effects linear regression. A significant Condition × Time interaction was found, F(2, 1219) = 3.35, p = .035, demonstrating that only the intervention group showed an improvement in motor ability. A significant Sex × Time interaction was also found, F(2, 1219) = 3.84, p = .022, with boys improving over time, but not girls. These findings have important implications for the efficacy of early intervention of motor skills and understanding the differences in motor performance between boys and girls.     

Training compliance control yields improved drawing in 5–11 year old children with motor difficulties

There are a large number of children with motor difficulties including those that have difficulty producing movements qualitatively well enough to improve in perceptuo-motor learning without intervention. We have developed a training method that supports active movement generation to allow improvement in a 3D tracing task requiring good compliance control. Previously, we tested a limited age range of children and found that training improved performance on the 3D tracing task and that the training transferred to a 2D drawing test. In the present study, school children (5–11 years old) with motor difficulties were trained in the 3D tracing task and transfer to a 2D drawing task was tested. We used a cross-over design where half of the children received training on the 3D tracing task during the first training period and the other half of the children received training during the second training period. Given previous results, we predicted that younger children would initially show reduced performance relative to the older children, and that performance at all ages would improve with training. We also predicted that training would transfer to the 2D drawing task. However, the pre-training performance of both younger and older children was equally poor. Nevertheless, post-training performance on the 3D task was dramatically improved for both age groups and the training transferred to the 2D drawing task. Overall, this work contributes to a growing body of literature that demonstrates relatively preserved motor learning in children with motor difficulties and further demonstrates the importance of games in therapeutic interventions.