POSTURAL CONTROL AND COORDINATION DISORDERS - THE SWINGING ROOM REVISITED

The postural stability of different groups of children was examined us ing the ''swinging-room'' paradigm of Lee, D.N., Aronson, E., 1974. Pe rception and Psychophysics 15, 529-532. Nursery age children (3-4 year s), children with co-ordination difficulties (DCD: 10-12 years), age-m atched controls and adults were compared in their sway responses when they were presented with a moving visual world while standing upright on a static floor. Gain estimates for the vision-posture transfer func tion suggested that nursery children still depend upon vision as a maj or source of postural information, whereas this dependence is not evid ent in older control children. The children with DCD could be separate d into two groups: (i) those who had postural control problems and dem onstrated a bias to use visual information equivalent to the nursery c hildren and (ii) those who passed a standard postural control assessme nt and did not differ from age-matched controls in the swinging room c ontext. (C) 1998 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.