Gavin Buckingham: Developmental Coordination Disorder - current research and future directions

Dr Gavin Buckingham University of Exeter Please note that this recording starts halfway through Dr Buckingham's presentation and covers his public engagement work, future research directions, and audience Q&A. Slides for the full presentation are available to download here: https://tinyurl.com/8uamh7pc Abstract: Developmental coordination disorder (DCD, sometimes called ‘dyspraxia’) describes a condition of poor motor performance in the absence of intellectual impairment. Despite being one of the most prevalent developmental disorders, little is known about how fundamental sensorimotor processes might function in this group. One popular idea is children with DCD interact with their environment in a less predictive fashion than typically developing children. In this talk, I will outline some work we have conducted examining sensorimotor prediction and visuomotor control in this group in the context of object interaction and heaviness perception (in brief, we find almost no evidence for a selective deficit in prediction in children with DCD). I will then describe our ongoing public engagement work (with this video, which I’d encourage you to share:    • Dyspraxia!  ) and patient-public involvement to lay out a path for where we see this work moving in the future. Speaker bio: Gavin Buckingham was awarded his Ph.D. in Psychology from the University of Aberdeen (UK) in 2008, examining attention in the context of hand preferences. Following the completion of his Ph.D., he moved to Canada to take up a position as a postdoctoral fellow in the Brain and Mind Institute at Western University in Canada working with Prof. Mel Goodale. His work here mostly focused on how we perceive weight and interact with objects in the world around us, for which he was awarded an NSERC Banting Postdoctoral Fellowship. In February 2016, he joined the Department Sport and Health Sciences at the University of Exeter (UK) where he is a Senior Lecturer and the head of the Object Interaction Lab (https://sites.google.com/site/obintlab).