BACKGROUND Almost half of young children do not achieve minimum recommendations of 60 daily minutes in physical activity. Physical activity is potentially an important determinant of the development of motor competence in children. This study is one of very few longitudinal studies in this area and the first to investigate early childhood physical activity as a predictor of subsequent motor ski...

OBJECTIVE: In both clinical practice and research, motor delay is understood to be explained, at least in part, by intellectual abilities; however, no data are available to operationalize these criteria to guide clinical decision making. This study provides data on IQ and motor skills in children to answer 3 research questions concerning the relationship between IQ and motor skill: (1) Can moto...

This study attempts to investigate the role of sensorimotor impairments in the reading disability that characterizes dyslexia. Twenty-three children with dyslexia were compared to 22 control children, matched for age and non-verbal intelligence, on tasks assessing literacy as well as phonological, visual, auditory and motor abilities. The dyslexic group as a whole were significantly impaired on...

In this paper I discuss some of the strengths and weaknesses of two different approaches to teaching motor skills to students in outdoor education and outdoor recreation settings. Using acronyms to describe their stages: DEDICT is a six step, direct instructional model that some outdoor leaders may already be familiar with; and FERAL is my adaptation of a discovery learning approach that can be...

This study attempts to investigate the role of sensorimotor impairments in the reading disability that characterizes dyslexia. Twenty-three children with dyslexia were compared to 22 control children, matched for age and non-verbal intelligence, on tasks assessing literacy as well as phonological, visual, auditory and motor abilities. The dyslexic group as a whole were significantly impaired on...

Abundant evidence points to a key role of dopamine in motor skill learning, although the underlying cellular and molecular mechanisms are still poorly understood. Here, we used a skilled-reaching paradigm to first examine changes in the expression of the plasticity-related gene Arc to map activity in cortico-striatal circuitry during different phases of motor skill learning in young animals. In...

This paper discusses the relevance of recent research on the economics of human development to the work of the Human Development and Capability Association. The recent economics of human development brings insights about the dynamics of skill accumulation to an otherwise static literature on capabilities. Skills embodied in agents empower people. Enhanced skills enhance opportunities and hence ...

Cognitive psychologists have long recognized that the acquisition of a motor skill involves a transition from attention-demanding controlled processing to more fluent automatic processing. Neuroscientific studies suggest that controlled and automatic processing rely on two largely distinct neural pathways. The controlled pathway, which includes the prefrontal cortex, is seen as acquiring declar...

BACKGROUND Our aim was to examine the relationship between motor skill proficiency and perceptions of competence of children in their first year of school. We also explored gender-based differences. FINDINGS Participants were 260 kindergarten children (mean age = 5y 9 m; boys = 52%) from eight schools; representing 78% of eligible children in those schools. Motor skills were measured using th...

The role of visual information and action representations in executing a motor task was examined from a mental representations approach. High-skill (n = 20) and low-skill (n = 20) soccer players performed a passing task to two targets at distances of 9.14 and 18.29 m, under three visual conditions: normal, occluded, and distorted vision (i.e., +4.0 corrective lenses, a visual acuity of approxim...