To examine the coupling between visual information and body sway in adults with DS.
Twenty adults with DS (25.8 ± 4.0 years) and twenty age- and sex-matched controls (25.6 ± 4.0 years) stood upright inside a “moving room” in two experimental conditions: continuous (room oscillated continuously at 0.1, 0.2, and 0.5 Hz) and discrete (room moved forward or backward for a brief moment). Tridimensional body sway and moving room displacement data were registered.
Individuals with DS coupled their body sway to the imposed visual stimulus, but showed higher position variability at frequencies other than the frequency of room movement (0.48 cm) and lower coherence (0.80) than controls (0.40 cm and 0.90, respectively).
Adults with DS were able to couple to the visual cue, but with differences in terms of the scaling of postural responses to spatial parameters of the visual stimulus.