Attention demand and postural control in children with hearing deficit.
Children with hearing loss need a preview of new balance tasks or posture and cognition both suffer.
01Research in Context
What this study did
The team watched children with hearing loss stand still on a soft pad.
They added a tricky balance task to see if the kids swayed more than peers.
Each child also answered quick questions while standing to test split attention.
What they found
Kids with hearing loss wobbled more and took longer to answer.
When the stance was new, both balance and thinking dropped at once.
How this fits with other research
Razuk et al. (2014) saw the same sway pattern in dyslexic kids when visual cues were cut.
Both studies show sensory limits steal resources from posture control.
Koegel et al. (2014) looked at motor load in children with DCD and found no extra hit to thinking.
That seems opposite, but L et al. used pencil tasks, not whole-body balance.
The body task used here is harder, so the double drop makes sense.
Neves et al. (2023) later taught language to hearing-impaired kids with errorless drills.
Together the papers say: reduce errors in new tasks for this group, motor or verbal.
Why it matters
If you run gross-motor programs, preview every new stance before you add instructions.
Demo the foam pad, let them feel it, then give the cue.
Keep language short while the body is learning.
This small pre-teach can spare both falls and frustration.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
To elucidate the mechanisms responsible for deteriorated postural control in children with hearing deficit (CwHD), we measured center-of-pressure (COP) variability, mean velocity and entropy in bipedal quiet stance (feet together) with or without the concurrent cognitive task (reaction to visual stimulus) on hard or foam surface in 29 CwHD and a control group of 29 typically developing children (CON). The CwHD displayed an overall decreased postural performance as compared to the CON in the medial-lateral plane (p<0.05). Standing on foam pad revealed slower simple reaction time in the CwHD (p<0.05) while the results on hard surface were not different. The CwHD decreased (p<0.05) the amount of attention invested in posture during dual task which accounted for the need of more cognitive resources to handle two tasks simultaneously than controls. It was unmistakable that the intergroup differences emerged when the tasks performed were relatively novel and untrained: feet together, foam pad, and reaction time. All these tasks, while being very easy for the CON, made the CwHD deteriorate postural or cognitive performance. These results unravel the difficulty in reaching the consecutive developmental stages in the CwHD and call for specific therapeutic modalities that might facilitate this development.
Research in developmental disabilities, 2011 · doi:10.1016/j.ridd.2011.03.009