Anticipatory Motor Planning and Control of Grasp in Children with Unilateral Spastic Cerebral Palsy.

Children with unilateral spastic cerebral palsy (USCP) have impairments in motor planning, impacting their ability to grasp objects. We examined the planning of digit position and force and the flexibility of the motor system in covarying these during object manipulation. Eleven children with a left hemisphere lesion (LHL), nine children with a right hemisphere lesion (RHL) and nine typically developing children (controls) participated in the study.

Exploration of Graduate Health Care Student Writing Skills Using a Transformational Learning Approach to a Literacy Enrichment Program.

Background: Health care educators are obligated to ensure that student writing skills are current, appropriate, and integrated into their role as future practitioners. The purpose of this study was to examine the impact and satisfaction of a transformational learning approach in a literacy-enriched health professions program on student's writing skills.

Methods: Two different cohorts of occupational therapy students enrolled in a literacy program embedded in the first year of the professional phase of the occupational therapy program curriculum.

When infants take mothers' advice: 18-month-olds integrate perceptual and social information to guide motor action.

The social cognition and perception-action literatures are largely separate, both conceptually and empirically. However, both areas of research emphasize infants' emerging abilities to use available information--social and perceptual information, respectively--for making decisions about action. Borrowing methods from both research traditions, this study examined whether 18-month-old infants incorporate both social and perceptual information in their motor decisions.