Effect Of Fine Motor Skills On Executive Function In Children With Intellectual Disabilities

Executive function refers to the cognitive process that an individual controls his/her thoughts,behaviors,and emotions in order to achieve specific goals,including three core components:inhibitory control,working memory,and cognitive flexibility.Executive function plays a vital role in the social adaptation of children with intellectual disabilities.Previous studies have found that the fine motor skills of children with intellectual disabilities were related to their working memory and planning ability.However,these studies had a small sample size and only examined the correlation between fine motor skills and one or two components of executive function,the relationships have not been fully revealed between fine motor skills and executive functions in children with intellectual disabilities.Thus,this thesis aimed to explore the impact of fine motor skills on executive functions of children with intellectual disabilities through a correlational study and a training study.Study 1 aimed to reveal the correlation between fine motor skills and executive functions in children with intellectual disabilities.The study selected 105 children with intellectual disabilities,including 74 boys and 31 girls,M_age=13.25 years,SD=2.42.All children were asked to complete the tests of fine motor skills,inhibitory control,working memory and cognitive flexibility.The results found that fine motor skill was associated with inhibitory control,working memory and cognitive flexibility of children with intellectual disabilities.After controlling for age and gender,fine motor skill significantly predicted inhibitory control and working memory,but not cognitive flexibility.Study 2 used the classic experimental design of pretest/posttest,which included the experimental group and the control group,to reveal the causal relationship between fine motor skills and executive function of children with intellectual disabilities.A total of 40 children with intellectual disabilities were selected as participants,including 26 boys and 14 girls,M_age=13.99 years,SD=2.45.All children were divided into an experimental group and a control group,with 13 boys and 7 girls in each group.The tasks used to measure fine motor skills,inhibitory control,working memory and cognitive flexibility in the pretest and the posttest were the same as those in Study 1.There were no differences between the two groups in gender,age,intelligence,fine motor skills and executive function.The experimental group was received a total of 18 days of fine motor skills training,once a day,10minutes each time.At the same time,the control group was asked to read their favorite books.The results showed that the posttest performance of the experimental group on fine motor skills and executive function was significantly better than those in the pretest,while the control group had no significant changes between in the pretest and the posttest.This indicated that fine motor skills training led to the improvement of executive function in children with intellectual disabilities.Taken together,the results of these two studies indicated that fine motor skills are one of the psychological mechanisms that affects the development of executive function in children with intellectual disabilities.This not only extends the application scope of embodied cognition theory to children with special needs,but also provides practical guidance for improving the executive function of children with intellectual disabilities from the perspective of fine motor skills.