Deficits in the endogenous control of covert visuospatial attention in children with developmental coordination disorder

Deficits in the covert orienting of visuospatial attention have been report ed in children with Developmental Coordination Disorder (DCD). Using two ne w versions of the covert orienting of visuospatial attention task (COVAT), the study presented here sought to investigate how generalised deficits are in this domain by using longer time intervals between cue and imperative s timulus. Twenty children with DCD and 20 controls were tested on two differ ent COVATs with the interval between cue and peripheral imperative stimulus (or stimulus onset asynchrony, SOA) of 150 and 850 ms presented in a rando m sequence: the first used peripheral cues and no probability information ( exogenous mode) and the second used central cues and an 80% probability tha t imperative stimuli would appear at the cued location (endogenous mode). R esults showed that the time course of covert orienting to peripheral cues w as normal in both groups, For central cues, however, children with DO were more disadvantaged by invalid cues compared with controls, regardless of SO A; this finding was consistent with a deficit in the disengage operation of directing covert attention;These results confirm and extend our earlier fi nding that impairments in the endogenous control of covert visuospatial att ention exist in children with DCD. (C) 1999 Elsevier Science B.V. All right s reserved.