Cognitive-motor interference during fine and gross motor tasks in children with Developmental Coordination Disorder (DCD).
Extra thinking while moving disproportionately slows kids with DCD—strip the distractions and teach parts separately.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Schott et al. (2016) asked kids with and without DCD to walk or trace shapes while doing a simple counting task. They timed how fast each child moved under single-task and dual-task conditions.
The team wanted to test the automatization-deficit idea: that children with DCD need extra brain power for every step or pencil stroke.
What they found
Kids with DCD slowed down far more than peers when they had to think and move at the same time. Even easy mental work made their legs or fingers lag.
The gap was big enough to see without a stopwatch — the DCD group looked cautious and hesitant during the dual-task trials.
How this fits with other research
Cignetti et al. (2018) dug deeper and found that DCD-plus-dyslexia kids have a unique feed-forward lag, not just the dual-task cost Nadja saw. Together the papers map two separate motor-planning bottlenecks.
Kayabınar et al. (2025) looked at kids with Duchenne muscular dystrophy using the same walk-and-count setup. Both studies show large dual-task motor drops, but the causes differ: weak muscles in DMD, poor automatization in DCD. Same lab sign, different roots.
Cruz-Montecinos et al. (2024) repeated the gait dual-task with children who have intellectual disability and got similar negative results. The pattern is now clear across three diagnoses: extra mental load hits neurodevelopmental groups harder.
Why it matters
When you ask a child with DCD to carry a tray while walking to the snack table, you are really giving them a dual-task. Expect slower, shakier movement and build in wait time. Start with single skills, then blend once each part is automatic. Reduce noise, visuals, or chat during motor work so their limited bandwidth goes to the skill you want.
Want CEUs on This Topic?
The ABA Clubhouse has 60+ free CEUs — live every Wednesday. Ethics, supervision & clinical topics.
Join Free →Count out loud yourself while the child walks a balance beam—if speed drops, note dual-task cost and cut the cognitive load next trial.
02At a glance
03Original abstract
BACKGROUND: While typically developing children produce relatively automatized postural control processes, children with DCD seem to exhibit an automatization deficit. Dual tasks with various cognitive loads seem to be an effective way to assess the automatic deficit hypothesis. AIMS: The aims of the study were: (1) to examine the effect of a concurrent cognitive task on fine and gross motor tasks in children with DCD, and (2) to determine whether the effect varied with different difficulty levels of the concurrent task. METHODS AND PROCEDURES: We examined dual-task performance (Trail-Making-Test, Trail-Walking-Test) in 20 children with DCD and 39 typically developing children. Based on the idea of the Trail-Making-Test, participants walked along a fixed pathway, following a prescribed path, delineated by target markers of (1) increasing sequential numbers, and (2) increasing sequential numbers and letters. The motor and cognitive dual-task effects (DTE) were calculated for each task. RESULTS: Regardless of the cognitive task, children with DCD performed equally well in fine and gross motor tasks, and were slower in the dual task conditions than under single task-conditions, compared with children without DCD. Increased cognitive task complexity resulted in slow trail walking as well as slower trail tracing. The motor interference for the gross motor tasks was least for the simplest conditions and greatest for the complex conditions and was more pronounced in children with DCD. Cognitive interference was low irrespective of the motor task. CONCLUSIONS AND IMPLICATIONS: Children with DCD show a different approach to allocation of cognitive resources, and have difficulties making motor skills automatic. The latter notion is consistent with impaired cerebellar function and the "automatization deficit hypothesis", suggesting that any deficit in the automatization process will appear if conscious monitoring of the motor skill is made more difficult by integrating another task requiring attentional resources.
Research in developmental disabilities, 2016 · doi:10.1016/j.ridd.2016.07.003