Neural Correlates of Rhythmic Auditory–Motor Timing in Developmental Coordination Disorder and the Role of Musical Training
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Auditory rhythms enable the brain to make temporal predictions about upcoming stimuli and entrain motor responses even below levels of conscious perception. Although positive effects of rhythmic entrainment have been demonstrated in adults with movement disorders, it is unclear whether these benefits apply to children with developmental coordination disorder (DCD). DCD remains largely underdiagnosed despite being one of the most common neurodevelopmental conditions, and studies examining auditory-motor interactions in DCD are scarce. This thesis comprises three articles that aim to provide a comprehensive behavioural and neurophysiological assessment of auditory-motor abilities in children with DCD and in typically developing (TD) children with and without musical training. Chapters 1 and 2 introduce relevant literature and the purpose of the thesis. Chapter 3 provides a critical appraisal of existing literature and highlights a gap in research regarding auditory-perceptual abilities in DCD. Chapters 4 and 5 examined rhythmic timing by combining electroencephalography, adaptive psychophysical procedures, finger-tapping paradigms, and standardized neuropsychological tests. Chapter 4 demonstrates that children with DCD can benefit from rhythmic auditory cues despite displaying vulnerabilities in rhythm perception compared to their TD peers with musical training. Notably, children with musical training consistently outperformed their DCD and TD peers across tasks, suggesting that rhythmic skills can be enhanced through practice. At the neural level, paced tapping was associated with increased beta power in the motor cortex and decreased functional connectivity in the ipsilateral fronto-central network compared to unpaced tapping, indicating that the presence of auditory cues reduced the demand for neural processing. In Chapter 5, we examined the influence of awareness on rhythmic motor adjustments and showed that children with DCD can employ similar synchronization strategies as their TD peers when adjusting to large and small perturbations in auditory sequence. However, they displayed reduced interhemispheric connectivity when making planned adaptations compared to their TD peers, providing evidence of atypical transfer between the hemispheres. Chapter 6 synthesizes these findings. Together, this thesis made novel contributions to understanding the link between rhythmic timing and neural cortical activity in children, providing compelling evidence for the use of individually tailored rhythm-based interventions in children with DCD.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".