Spatial cognition in children with physical disability; what is the impact of restrictedindependent exploration?
On account of the developmental relationship between motor ability and spatial skills. we investigated the impact of physical disability (PD) on spatial cognition. Fifty-three children with special educational needs including PD took part. The children with PD were divided into those who were wheelchair users (N=34) and those who had independent locomotion (N=19). This division enabled us to additionally determine the impact of limited independent physical exploration on spatial competence (exploration is typically relatively restricted for wheelchair users). Performance of the PD groups was compared to that of typically developing (TD) children who spanned the range of non-verbal ability of the PD groups. Participants completed three spatial tasks; a mental rotation task, a Bee-bot route task and a desktop virtual reality (VR) navigation task. The PD groups broadly demonstrated lower levels of performance than the TD children. However, when performance was considered with reference to participant’s learning difficulties, this demonstrated that levels of impairment across tasks were broadly commensurate with their overall level of non-verbal ability. The exception to this was the performance of the PD wheelchair group on the mental rotation task, which was below that expected for their level of non-verbal ability. Group differences in task approach were evident for the Bee-Bot task; both PD groups showed a different pattern of errors than the TD group. These findings suggest that for children with learning difficulties and PD, the developmental impact of having physical disabilities on spatial ability, over and above the impact of having learning difficulties, is minimal.