Developmental relationships between motor skills and executive functioning in children with intellectual disabilities

Theoretical and empirical evidence suggests a link between motor skills and executive functioning, yet the nature of this relation remains relatively unexplored in children with intellectual disabilities. This study focuses on exploring the developmental relationships between motor skills and executive functioning in this population. We utilized a longitudinal approach to follow 101 children with intellectual disabilities, ranging in age from 7 to 17, across three measurement points with one-year intervals. At each measurement point, participants completed tasks evaluating gross motor skills, fine motor skills, and executive functioning. Random intercept cross-lagged panel modeling revealed distinctive motor-executive function relationship patterns. Specifically, fine motor skills and executive functioning reciprocally predicted each other between Time 1 and Time 2. Additionally, fine motor skills at Time 2 significantly predicted executive functioning at Time 3, whereas the reverse pattern was not observed. In contrast, no significant longitudinal relationship was found between gross motor skills and executive functioning. These findings suggest that interventions integrating fine motor skills and executive functioning could be essential for children with intellectual disabilities, providing an important avenue to support their skills development.