Body Representations in Children with Cerebral Palsy

Abstract

We constantly process top-down and bottom-up inputs concerning our own body that interact to form body representations (BR). Even if some evidence showed BR deficits in children with cerebral palsy, a systematic study that evaluates different kinds of BR in these children, taking into account the possible presence of a general deficit affecting non-body mental representations, is currently lacking. Here we aimed at investigating BR (i.e., Body Semantics, Body Structural Representation and Body Schema) in children with cerebral palsy (CP) taking into account performance in tasks involving body stimuli and performance in tasks involving non-body stimuli. Thirty-three CP (age range: 5–12 years) were compared with a group of 103 typically-developing children (TDC), matched for age and sex. 63.64% of children with CP showed a very poor performance in body representation processing. Present data also show alterations in different body representations in CP in specific developmental stages. In particular, CP and TDC performances did not differ between 5 to 7 years old, whereas CP between 8 and 12 years old showed deficits in the Body Structural Representation and Body Schema but not in Body Semantics. These findings revealed the importance of taking into account the overall development of cognitive domains when investigating specific stimuli processing in children who do not present a typical development and were discussed in terms of their clinical implications.

Body Representation Alterations in Patients with Unilateral Brain Damage

“…Currently there is a lack of normative tests probing the different BRs. For this reason, BR tasks were carefully choose among experimental tasks that have proved to be very sensitive to detect BR deficit in several previous studies on adults with brain damage (Canzano, Piccardi, Bureca, & Guariglia, 2011;Guariglia & Antonucci, 1992;Schwoebel & Coslett, 2005) and children with cerebral palsy (Fontes et al, 2017;Di Vita et al, 2020). These tasks were also used in recent studies on the development of BRs in healthy children and young adults (Raimo et al, 2019) and on BR in older adults (Raimo et al, 2021).…”

Topological and hodological aspects of body representation in right brain damaged patients

“…To this aim, we conceived tasks similar to the ones used to test body representation, but which did not involve body-related stimuli (hereafter called control tasks). This set of tasks had been successfully used to test the development of body representations in healthy children and young adults (Raimo et al, 2019b), its impairment in cerebral palsy (Di Vita et al, 2019a) and its disruption after brain injury (Raimo et al, 2019a). As for the previous studies, all the tasks were performed on a laptop (13.3 ′′ display), equipped with a touch screen monitor.…”

The Body across the Lifespan: On the Relation between Interoceptive Sensibility and High-Order Body Representations

“…Then, we divided them into two groups: 65 typically developing children from 7 to 8 years old (31 girls and 34 boys; 56 right-handed), and 37 typically developing children from 9 to 10 years old (24 girls and 13 boys; 30 right-handed). This group division was relevant since previous literature showed that children until 8 years of age do not reach optimal multisensory integration of visual and haptic information [ 35 , 36 ], do not reach an adult-like pattern regarding localizing body parts [ 16 ], and do not show significant differences in BR compared to children with atypical development [ 34 ].…”

“…According to the distinction of BR into action- and non-action-oriented [ 10 ], the assessment of BR was performed using a specific computerized battery previously used to assess BR in healthy children and adults [ 16 , 20 ], and in children and adults with brain damage [ 5 , 7 , 34 ]. The battery included BR tasks to evaluate both action (i.e., body schema) and non-action (i.e., body structural representation) oriented BR, and two corresponding control tasks, similar to those recording BR for features such as presentation and response modalities, but not including body stimuli and then not involving body processing.…”

“…Despite being theoretically relevant, a better understanding of BR across the life span and of the role of the interoceptive sensitivity is also necessary to improve our knowledge of BR deviations from typical development and physiological aging in clinical populations in order to provide tailored rehabilitation training programs for specific BR deficits. Additionally, BR deficit following a stroke or cerebral palsy can have a huge impact on motor rehabilitation, since BR interact with the motor system in the genesis of actions (for such an argument, see [ 7 , 34 ]).…”