Effects of cardiorespiratory fitness enhancement on deficits in visuospatial working memory in children with developmental coordination disorder: a cognitive electrophysiological study

Abstract

The present study aimed to explore the effectiveness of chronic aerobic exercise intervention on the behavioral and neuroelectric performances of children with developmental coordination disorder (DCD) when carrying out a visuospatial working memory (VSWM) task. Twenty typically developing children and 40 children with DCD, equally divided into DCD-training and DCD nontraining groups, performed the cognitive task with concomitant event-related potential recording before and after 16 weeks of endurance training. Results indicated that the children with DCD displayed VSWM deficits with regard to behavioral performance (i.e., slower reaction time and low accuracy rate) and the neuroelectric indices (i.e., smaller P3 and pSW amplitudes) during the retrieval-process phase as reported in previous studies. However, after the exercise intervention, DCD-training group showed significantly higher accuracy rates and enhanced P3 amplitudes during the encoding and retrieval-process phases, compared with their pre-training performances. These findings suggest that increased cardiorespiratory fitness could effectively improve the performance of the VSWM task in children with DCD, by enabling the allocation of greater working memory resources related to encoding and retrieval.

Keywords: Cardiorespiratory fitness; Developmental coordination disorder; Event-related potential; Exercise intervention; Working memory.