Postural control and co-ordination disorders: The swinging room revisited

The postural stability of different groups of children was examined using the “swinging-room” paradigm of Lee, D.N., Aronson, E., 1974. Perception and Psychophysics 15, 529–532. Nursery age children (3–4 years), children with co-ordination difficulties (DCD: 10–12 years), age-matched controls and adults were compared in their sway responses when they were presented with a moving visual world while standing upright on a static floor. Gain estimates for the vision-posture transfer function suggested that nursery children still depend upon vision as a major source of postural information, whereas this dependence is not evident in older control children. The children with DCD could be separated into two groups: (i) those who had postural control problems and demonstrated a bias to use visual information equivalent to the nursery children and (ii) those who passed a standard postural control assessment and did not differ from age-matched controls in the swinging room context.