| Resumo: | Visual Impairment (VI) affects typical human motor development. Persons with VI generally perform poorer in daily life activities when compared with their sighted peers, with impact in their quality of life. Recent studies points out the benefits of sports for people with VI. The unique ball game specifically for people with VI is Goalball that promotes, among others, physical work capacity, orientation skills, and other psychomotor skills improvement such as manual dexterity, body notion, and space-time structure. However, the beneficial effect of Goalball on these skills is not that well documented. Therefore, the study aimed to characterize the psychomotor factors of Body Notion, Manual Dexterity and Space-Time Structure of Goalball athletes and non-athletes with VI. All 40 participants, aged between 19 and 68 years-old ((40.88±12.99), 30 male and 10 female, were divided in two groups: Goalball athletes (n=20) and non-athletes (n=20). The evaluation instrument was elaborated specifically for this study was based on other tests such as Psychomotor Battery, Motor Proficiency Test of Bruininks-Oseretsky and Body Skills. There were significant differences between Goalball players and non-Goalball players regarding several psychomotor tasks. For data treatment were used the parametric techniques of t-student and post-hoc tests (p≤0.05). Results showed: I) more positive results for female participants regarding manual dexterity and body notion; ii) blind participants tend to use, mostly, their left ear; iii) better performance in body notion and space-time structure of participants with congenital VI; iv) student and retired participants showed less favorable results in body notion and time-space structure; v) participants with lower scholar levels performed worst in all tasks of the three psychomotor factors; vi) goalball-athletes performed better in most of the psychomotor tasks compared with goalball no-athletes; vii) other sports-athletes presented better performance in all 3 psychomotor areas, in comparation with Goalball athletes.
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