Touch may reduce cognitive load during assisted typing by individuals with developmental disabilities

Giovanni Nicoli; Giulia Pavon; Andrew Grayson; Anne Emerson; Suvobrata Mitra

doi:10.3389/fnint.2023.1181025

Touch may reduce cognitive load during assisted typing by individuals with developmental disabilities

Front Integr Neurosci. 2023 Aug 3:17:1181025. doi: 10.3389/fnint.2023.1181025. eCollection 2023.

Authors

Giovanni Nicoli¹, Giulia Pavon¹, Andrew Grayson¹, Anne Emerson², Suvobrata Mitra¹

Affiliations

¹ School of Social Sciences, Nottingham Trent University, Nottingham, United Kingdom.
² Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Nottingham, Nottingham, United Kingdom.

Abstract

Many techniques have attempted to provide physical support to ease the execution of a typing task by individuals with developmental disabilities (DD). These techniques have been controversial due to concerns that the support provider's touch can influence the typed content. The most common interpretation of assisted typing as an ideomotor phenomenon has been qualified recently by studies showing that users with DD make identifiable contributions to the process. This paper suggests a neurophysiological pathway by which touch could lower the cognitive load of seated typing by people with DD. The required sensorimotor processes (stabilizing posture and planning and executing manual reaching movements) and cognitive operations (generating and transcribing linguistic material) place concurrent demands on cognitive resources, particularly executive function (EF). A range of developmental disabilities are characterized by deficits in sensorimotor and EF capacity. As light touch has been shown to facilitate postural coordination, it is proposed that a facilitator's touch could assist the seated typist with sensorimotor and EF deficits by reducing their sensorimotor workload and thereby freeing up shared cognitive resources for the linguistic elements of the task. This is the first theoretical framework for understanding how a facilitator's touch may assist individuals with DD to contribute linguistic content during touch-assisted typing.

Keywords: assisted typing; autism; cognitive load; cognitive-motor interference; developmental disabilities; executive function; light touch; touch.

Grants and funding

GN and GP’s studentship is partly funded by Vi Comunico Che Penso, a charitable organization whose mission includes supporting the development of facilitated communication, a touch-based assistive system. The funder provided support in the form of salaries for GN. The funder did not, however, have any input into the research carried out under this studentship.