Activités de perlage et développement des fonctions cognitives chez les jeunes trisomiques 21 : cas de l’Association le Petit Prince et le Moabi (P²M)

Abstract

Beading is an activity that enables children with Down syndrome to discriminate and detect meaningful elements and properties in their environment. According to the ecological theory of development, which states that development relies on the progressive differentiation of affordances, beading activity, through the discrimination process it allows, would be linked to the acquisition of motor skills. However, although it is accepted that fine manual motor skills are a determinant of cognitive function development in young people with Down syndrome, the link between beading activity and its potential effects on cognitive development is paradoxically little studied. This work focuses on "Beading activities and cognitive function development in children with Down syndrome". Its objective is to understand the contribution of beading activities to the development of cognitive functions in young people with Down syndrome. This study is qualitative. It is based on a combination of qualitative methods combining a component of individual interviews and observation operations. It involved 20 children with Down syndrome aged 6 to 22; recruited using voluntary participation sampling combined with a snowball approach. The collected data were analyzed using the cross-analysis method. Through color sorting, bead threading, and mosaic, the results made it possible to highlight cognitive functions in our T21 participants such as their attentional abilities thanks to visual stimulation and task completion, their mnemonic abilities thanks to task repetition and instruction comprehension, and their creative abilities thanks to the freedom of choice and the use of different tools. These results also demonstrated that participants need to be stimulated before activities to be motivated and engaged (attention stimulation), to use different skills despite fine motor difficulties (improvement of eye-hand coordination and motor planning), and to explore their creative abilities by trying new skills and using different tools (development of working memory and cognitive flexibility). This makes it possible to understand that children with Down syndrome have abilities in performing certain artistic tasks in general, and beading in particular. These abilities are related to understanding and applying instructions.