Children with developmental coordination disorder (DCD) and their ability to disengage ongoing attentional focus: more on inhibitory function

Children with developmental coordination disorder (DCD), along with their Control counterparts, completed two endogenous, spatial precue tasks. When the precue arrow was informative (.80) with respect to target location, the spatial precue effect results demonstrated that children with DCD take significantly longer than Control individuals to volitionally disengage (inhibit) attention from an endogenously cued location (i.e., a disengagement inhibition deficit). When the precue was uninformative (.25), we found, contrary to a common assumption, that the precue arrow automatically moved attention in the direction of the arrow, and, in addition, that DCD children may also be less able to inhibit the precued-induced urge to move attention (i.e., an initiation inhibition deficit). This type of inhibitory difficulty was also indicated for manual response inclinations produced on catch trials. Overall, DCD children appeared to have an elevated difficulty suppressing the initiation of incorrect, stimulus-provoked movement urges, be they manual or attention in nature.