The role of inattention and hyperactivity/impulsivity in the fine motor coordination in children with ADHD☆
Section snippets
What this paper adds?
- 1.
This study provides empirical evidence for the hypothesis that children with ADHD have a poorer fine motor performance than children with typical development.
- 2.
The handwriting of the ADHD children is characterized by a less accurate line drawing, meaning more mistakes.
- 3.
Our results suggest that the fine motor coordination is related to the inattention dimension but not to the hyperactivity/impulsivity dimensions. Therefore, these difficulties would affect both clinical subtypes of ADHD
Participants
Participants were forty-three children with a diagnosis of ADHD aged between 7 and 14 years (M = 9.61; SD = 2.20; 81% male) and forty-two typically developing (TP) children in the same age range (M = 10.76; SD = 2.56; 75.2% male). ADHD cases were recruited from children's mental health centers. Exclusion criteria for the clinical group included a comorbid diagnosis of autism, epilepsy, psychotic disorders, intellectual disability, brain disorders or any medical disorder associated with externalizing
Fine psychomotricity performance comparison between groups
With the exception of the Series task variables, the remaining dependent variables were normally distributed (Kolmogorov-Smirnov test p > 0.05) and showed similar variance in ADHD children and controls (Levene’s test p > 0.05). In such cases, parametric or non-parametric analyses were applied accordingly. Neither age nor gender differences between groups were found.
A Mann–Whitney U test was conducted to assess the performance differences between the control and the clinical groups (Table 1).
Discussion
According to previous studies and our current findings, children diagnosed with ADHD show poorer handwriting ability on average than controls. Children with ADHD would be less accurate in line tracing than controls; however, this imprecision is not related to the hyperactivity/impulsivity dimension but is instead related to the inattention dimension. These results contrast with those reported by Noda et al. (2013). The authors found that inattention and fine motor skills were related to writing
Conclusion
In summary, this study provides empirical evidence for the hypothesis that children with ADHD have a poorer fine motor performance than children with typical development. The performance of the ADHD children is characterized by a less accurate line drawing, meaning more mistakes, which is related to the inattention dimension but not to the hyperactivity or impulsivity dimensions. This result suggests that fine motor difficulties would affect both clinical subtypes of ADHD (predominantly
Conflict of interest statement
The authors report no biomedical financial interests or potential conflicts of interest.
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This study was supported by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (project PSI2014-53427-P) and Fundación Séneca (project 19267/PI/14).