Suggestions are made for applying research findings to the teaching of physical education. (JD)

This article reports the first year results of a pilot study of 21 developmental milestones achieved by 82 visually impaired children in New York City. Some delays in visual-motor activities were found, as well as differences in the sequence of acquiring skills. Children with additional handicaps acquired milestones at a slower rate. (Author/DB)

Further commentary on distributed practice and the acquisition of motor skills points out that there are at least two viable theoretical perspectives that can be brought to bear on issues surrounding the acquisition of perceptual-motor skills. (JD)

Describes two experiments which examined how supplementing specific practice experiences with variable practice experiences influenced motor skill retention. Participants received varying trials of acquisition practice on a criterion force production task. Acquisition practice with variations of the criterion task led to better retention than…

The study, with 32 adolescents with mild mental retardation and controls, found that imagery practice facilitated the execution of the reaction time component of a motor task and sometimes facilitated performance of the movement time component of the motor task. (DB)

After 72 sessions for 3 hours per week, significantly more children aged 5-9 receiving sensory integration (SI) therapy (n=35) and perceptual motor training (n=35) showed improvement in SI functioning compared to 33 receiving no treatment. Similar effects were found for subgroups with vestibular dysfunction only (n=11, 13, and 11 respectively).…

Retrospective analysis of videotape recordings taken at 9 to 12 months of 11 children with autism, 10 with developmental disabilities, and 11 typically developing children found that nine behavioral items, in combination, discriminated the three groups 94 percent of the time. Results support early identification of autism and that infant…

This study compared effects of visual occlusion on the motor and spatial learning of 28 legally blind adult males, half due to acuity loss and half due to peripheral field restriction. For both groups, occlusion appeared neither to facilitate nor impede motor learning but did significantly impair acquisition of spatial relations. Results have…

This study examined consequences of the comorbidity of developmental coordination disorder (DCD) and learning disability (LD) for the severity and pattern of perceptual-motor dysfunction. Compared to children with only DCD, those with DCD and LD had poorer perceptual-motor ability, with particular difficulty performing manual dexterity and balance…

When a sensory cue was repeatedly followed by a behavioral event with fixed delays, pairs of premotor and primary motor neurons showed significant increases of coincident spikes at times a monkey was expecting the event. These results provided evidence that neuronal firing synchrony has predictive power. To elucidate the underlying mechanism, here…

Autonomously developing organisms face several challenges when learning reaching movements. First, motor control is learned unsupervised or self-supervised. Second, knowledge of sensorimotor contingencies is acquired in contexts in which action consequences unfold in time. Third, motor redundancies must be resolved. To solve all 3 of these…

The Rhythmic Movement Test (RMT) evaluates temporal and amplitude parameterization and fluency of movement execution in a series of rhythmic arm movements under different sensory conditions. The RMT was used in combination with a jumping and a drawing task, to evaluate 36 children with Developmental Coordination Disorder (DCD) and a matched…

This paper describes a neural model of speech acquisition and production that accounts for a wide range of acoustic, kinematic, and neuroimaging data concerning the control of speech movements. The model is a neural network whose components correspond to regions of the cerebral cortex and cerebellum, including premotor, motor, auditory, and…

This book presents a holistic approach to multicultural educational issues by viewing them in terms of the student as a physical, psychosocial, cognitive, ethical, and spiritual being. Conversely, these levels of a student's being cannot be seen apart from the student's cultural identities. This unique book demonstrates that, in a pluralistic…