Katina McCulloch

KU Leuven | ku leuven · Department of Rehabilitation Sciences

Background: High anxiety levels are common in people with intellectual disabilities (ID) and anxiety can affect sport performance, but sport competitive anxiety profiles in athletes with ID are unknown. Methods: A total of 303 athletes; 116 with ID (33% female, M age = 22.64, SD = 3.94), and 187 without ID (54% female, M age = 21.81, SD = 3.23),...

Trunk control (TC) impairment is a typical feature in individuals with cerebral palsy (CP), but there are lack of methods that allow to quantify the extent to which static and dynamic TC is impaired in adults with moderate-to-severe CP. Thus, the aims of this study were to analyze the reliability of a posturography protocol to assess TC in adults w...

Intelligence has long been associated with chronometric performance measures, such as reaction time (RT); however, few studies have investigated this relation in humans at the lower end of the intelligence range. The purpose of this study is to examine the inter-relation between RT, and intelligence in the population of athletes with mild to modera...

Cognition is important in many sports, for example, making split-second-decisions under pressure, or memorising complex movement sequences. The dual-task (DT) paradigm is an ecologically valid approach for the assessment of cognitive function in conjunction with motor demands. This study aimed to determine the impact of impaired intelligence on DT...

Background: Shot-put is one of the events in which athletes with intellectual impairment compete at the Paralympic Games, since their re-inclusion in 2012. The purpose of this study was to compare the competition performance and investigate differences in release parameters and consistency of performance between high level shot-put throwers with an...

Purpose: To understand how athletes invest their energy over a race, differences in pacing ability between athletes with and without intellectual impairment (II) were explored using a novel field test. Methods: Well-trained runners (n=67) participated in this study, including 34 runners with II (age = 24.4 ± 4.5 years; IQ = 63.1 ± 7.7) and 33 ru...

Pacing has been defined as the goal-directed regulation of exercise intensity over an exercise bout, in which athletes need to decide how and when to invest their energy. The purpose of this study was to explore if the regulation of exercise intensity during competitive track races is different between runners with and without intellectual impairme...

Background: Previous research has shown that cognitive and motor skills are related. The precise impact of cognitive impairment on sport proficiency, however, is unknown. Aims: This study investigated group and individual differences in cognitive profiles in a large cohort of track and field athletes, basketball players, swimmers and table tenni...