Motor response processing in clumsy children.

Twelve clumsy children and 12 controls executed a four choice reaction time task in two compatibility conditions and three precue conditions. The experimental results indicated that the cognitive decision process of response selection contributed to the slow but not to the inaccurate performance of clumsy children. Clumsy children, compared with controls, had more problems with the translation of the stimulus code (s) to the response code (r) when this translation required more transformations. Response selection is a cognitive process that is likely to be important for deficits in perceptual-motor skills.