Research On Working Memory And Central Executive Function Of Children With Developmental Coordination Disorder

According to the American Psychological Association(APA) statistics, the ratio for children with Developmental Coordination Disorder(DCD) is about 4%-10%.And children who are diagnosed with DCD are affected with motor-based restrictions in their daily life and learning.The DCD may even produce certain negative psychological effects on these children. Most of studies have shown that actions on the clumsy and uncoordinated are usually associated with some degree of temporal and spatial cognitive task performance injury,so this study aims to explore the working memory of children with DCD. The Developmental Coordination Disorder Questionnaire and Movement Assessment Battery of Children are used to identify children with DCD,at last 22 children out of nine classes from two primary schools were deemed to suffer DCD.All the subjects are from the fourth,fifth,and sixth grade,then 22 children at the same time were selected as control group.This study focus on working memory in children with DCD to test the verbal working memory, visual space working memory and executive function of children with DCD comprehensively.In Study 1,the task of operation verbal working memory is used test verbal working memory while the task of distance estimation is used to test visual spatial working memory separately. The results showed that the performance of children with DCD in the two tasks were significantly worse than the control group, it means that there are both verbal working memory and visual spatial working memory deficits in children with DCD. In the second study, tower of Hanoi task is used to test the central executive function of two groups.results showed that the scores on children with DCD are significantly lower than the control group, which showed that there is the damage of the central executive function in children with DCD.