Preschool Children Motor Development

Persisting Primitive Reflexes

motor development, fundamental motor skills, executive functions, neurodevelopmental

The preschool age period is crucial for motor and cognitive development, which retention primary reflexes can negatively influence. Primary reflexes are fixed motor patterns controlled from developmentally lower areas of CNS and are necessary for delivery, survival or rudimentary movement activation during infancy and should be progressively inhibited. Primary reflexes' retention increases the risk of blocks for further cognitive and motor development in higher, mainly cortical areas. Children in preschool and school age with non-inhibited primary reflexes displayed a poor level of fundamental movement skills and worse attention, self-regulation or working memory capacity. Children with the problems above usually pass a movement program based on developmental kinesiology, like Neurodevelopmental stimulation (NVS). NVS contains exercises that simulate situations for adequate processing of the primary reflex and allow the brain to correct and inhibit this reflex. Even though in the Czech preschool environment, almost 13% of children with neurotypical development have significant positive responses to at least one primary reflex, there are no methods to inhibit primary reflexes to improve motor and cognitive development positively. Therefore, this project aims to find how the NVS intervention will influence the performance in the selected area of motor and cognitive development, with the follow-up three-month retesting. Population for this project are preschool children aged 4-6 years old.

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