1998/09/01 by Peter H. Wilson, B. E. McKenzie · 337 citations
Psychology · Mathematics · Medicine · Neuroscience · #Children's Physical and Motor Development #Cognitive and developmental aspects of mathematical skills #Infant Development and Preterm Care #Psychology #Motor coordination #Information processing #Developmental psychology #Meta-analysis #Perception #Visual processing #Visual perception #Cognitive psychology #Neuroscience
paper · doi:10.1111/1469-7610.00384
published in Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry 39(6), 829-840 (Wiley)
openalex publication_date 1998/09/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/23
A meta-analysis was conducted to identify information processing factors that characterise children with Developmental Coordination Disorder (DCD). A total of 50 studies yielded 374 effect sizes based on 983 DCD and 987 control children. A mild generalised performance deficit was indicated, since motor-impaired children were inferior on almost all measures of information processing. There were, however, several areas where their deficiencies were more pronounced. The greatest deficiency was in visual-spatial processing. This was evident regardless of whether or not the tasks involved a motor component. Most other deficiencies were in the small-to-moderate range and included kinaesthetic and cross-modal processing. The findings support the notion that perceptual problems, particularly in the visual modality, are associated with difficulties in motor coordination.