Bi-directional prospective associations between objectively measured physical activity and fundamental motor skills in children: a two-year follow-up.

Background: The direction of the longitudinal relationship between physical activity (PA) and fundamental motor skills (FMS) remains unclear. We evaluated the bi-directional, prospective relationships between intensity-specific physical activity (PA) and domain-specific fundamental motor skills (FMS) over 2 years in children attending preschool at baseline.

Methods: A sample of 230 children (mean age at baseline 4.

Reliability and Structural Validity of the Movement Assessment Battery for Children-2 in Croatian Preschool Children.

Monitoring and assessment of the development of motor skills is an important goal for practitioners in many disciplines as well as researchers interested in motor development. A well-established tool for such purpose is the (MABC-2) which covers three age ranges and contains eight motor items in each range related to the manual dexterity, aiming and catching, and balance. The main aim of the study was to investigate the reliability and validity of the MABC-2 age band one in a sample of Croatian preschool children.

The multivariate physical activity signature associated with fundamental motor skills in preschoolers.

Physical activity (PA) is essential for development of fundamental motor skills (FMS) in children, but it is uncertain which PA intensities are most influential. A limitation to current evidence is the reliance on analytic approaches that cannot handle collinearity. The aim of this study was to determine the PA signature related to FMS in preschoolers, by investigating the association pattern for the whole spectrum of PA intensities using multivariate pattern analysis.

Children With Developmental Coordination Disorder.

This study tested the effect of task-specific training of a perceptual ability for children with Developmental Coordination Disorder (DCD) compared to control children. A manual matching task (target location and pointing task) was used, which required the children to locate target pins either visually (seen target) or proprioceptively (felt target), while matching to the located target was always carried out without vision. Thirty-one children (11-12 years) were selected based on teacher statements regarding everyday motor skill performance, the DSM-IV criteria, and the Movement ABC test.

The effects of background white noise on memory performance in inattentive school children.

Background: Noise is typically conceived of as being detrimental for cognitive performance; however, a recent computational model based on the concepts of stochastic resonance and dopamine related internal noise postulates that a moderate amount of auditive noise benefit individuals in hypodopaminergic states. On the basis of this model we predicted that inattentive children would be enhanced by adding background white noise while attentive children's performance would deteriorate.

Methods: Fifty-one secondary school pupils carried out an episodic verbal free recall test in two noise conditions.