Motor impersistence in normal and brain‐damaged children

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Abstract
The main purposes of this investigation were to asses the performance of normal children on 8 tasks involving the ability to sustain voluntary motor acts, to compare the performances of matched groups of brain-damaged and normal children on these tasks, and to determine the incidence of motor impersistence in the brain-damaged children. Previous studies reporting the occurrence of motor impersistence in adult patients with cerebral disease provided the impetus for the present investigation. The normal sample consisted of 140 children, 10 boys and 10 girls at each age level from 5 through 11 years. The brain-damaged group comprised 25 children within the same age range, all of whom had motor involvement of the extremities of cerebral origin. The experimental tasks consisted of keeping the eyes closed, protruding the tongue (blindfolded and with eyes open), fixation of gaze in lateral visual fields, keeping the mouth open, fixation of examiner''s nose during confrontation testing, head-turning during sensory testing, and producing a prolonged "ah" sound. Comparison of the performances of the 25 brain-damaged children and 25 normal children matched for sex, age, and mental level disclosed that the braindamaged children were significantly lower on 6 of the 8 tasks. The differences on the remaining 2 tasks were in the direction of poorer performance by the brain-damaged group but were not significant. For each task, motor impersistence was defined as a performance level exceeded by 95 to 100%. A significantly greater proportion of braindamaged children than normal children was found to be impersistent on each task, except head-turning during sensory testing. As an overall measure, pathological impersistence was attributed to each child showing impersistence on 2 or more tasks. Pathological impersistence was found in 3% of the normal children and 68% of the brain-damaged children. Using this definition as a cutting score, a screening efficiency of 93% was attained. No significant relationships between the incidence of impersistence in the brain-damaged group and age, sex, or intelligence could be shown. Impersistence was more frequent in children with left hemisphere or bilateral involvement than in those with right hemisphere involvement.

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