Research: Combined action observation and motor imagery training
Investigating how a new technique could help thousands of children with development coordination disorder learn essential living skills.
Summary
Research summary
- September 2020 to October 2021
This project is evaluating a new way of helping children with developmental coordination disorder (DCD) learn how to do essential everyday activities.
Children with DCD often have poor motor coordination which means they struggle with activities of daily living such as eating with cutlery or dressing themselves.
Our previous research in children with DCD has shown that combined action observation and motor imagery, which involves training by watching and imagining movements at the same time, can improve eye-hand coordination and movement performance.
In this study, children with DCD aged seven to 12 will be asked to practice using cutlery, tying shoelaces, buttoning a shirt and stacking cups while simultaneously watching videos of those movements on a mobile tablet and imagining doing the movements.
Their parents or guardians will assist the children with the training, and the experimenters will measure task performance and use eye-tracking equipment to record where the children are looking.
Some children will practise the tasks using the action observation and motor imagery training four times a week for four weeks. The others, in the control group, will do a similar daily living activity without the training.
We will measure changes in the children’s performance immediately after the month of training, and again several weeks later to see what difference it has made and whether the skills have been retained.
Participate
Take part in this research
If you are the parent or guardian of a child with a developmental coordination disorder diagnosis (or suspect that your child may have DCD), and want to take part in this study, please get in touch.
Outputs
Research output
- Academic papers, reports and other research outputs will be linked from here when they are published.
Related academic papers
- Marshall, B, Wright, DJ, Holmes, PS and Wood, G (2020) Combined action observation and motor imagery facilitates visuomotor adaptation in children with developmental coordination disorder Research in Developmental Disabilities, 98, 103570
- Marshall, B, Wright, DJ, Holmes, PS and Wood, G (2020) Combining action observation and motor imagery improves eye-hand coordination during novel visuomotor task performance Journal of Motor Behavior, 52, 333-341.
- Eaves, DL, Riach, M, Holmes, PS and Wright, DJ (2016) Motor Imagery during Action Observation: A Brief Review of Evidence, Theory and Future Research Opportunities, Frontiers in Neuroscience, 10, 514
- Wright, DJ, Williams, J and Holmes, PS (2014) Combined action observation and imagery facilitates corticospinal excitability Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 8, 951
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Scott, MW, Emerson, JR, Dixon, J, Tayler, MA and Eaves, DL (2019) Motor imagery during action observation enhances automatic imitation in children with and without developmental coordination disorder Journal of experimental child psychology, 183, 242-260
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Scott, MW, Emerson, JR, Dixon, J, Tayler, MA and Eaves, DL (2020) Motor imagery during action observation enhances imitation of everyday rhythmical actions in children with and without developmental coordination disorder. Human Movement Science, 71, 102620.
Team
Research team
Lead researcher
Co-researchers
- Dr Matthew Scott
- Prof Paul Holmes
- Dr Greg Wood
- Dr Jacqueline Williams (Victoria University, Australia)
Funding
With funding from
The Waterloo Foundation
Contact
Contact us
For general enquiries about our Neuroscience of Ageing and Impaired Mobility cluster, you can contact research lead Dr Nicola Ray.
