Children with Cerebral Palsy Have Altered Occipital Cortical Oscillations during a Visuospatial Attention Task

Abstract

Dynamically allocating neural resources to salient features or objects within our visual space is fundamental to making rapid and accurate decisions. Impairments in such visuospatial abilities have been consistently documented in the clinical literature on individuals with cerebral palsy (CP), although the underlying neural mechanisms are poorly understood. In this study, we used magnetoencephalography (MEG) and oscillatory analysis methods to examine visuospatial processing in children with CP and demographically matched typically developing (TD) children. Our results indicated robust oscillations in the theta (4–8 Hz), alpha (8–14 Hz), and gamma (64–80 Hz) frequency bands in the occipital cortex of both groups during visuospatial processing. Importantly, the group with CP exhibited weaker cortical oscillations in the theta and gamma frequency bands, as well as slower response times and worse accuracy during task performance compared to the TD children. Furthermore, we found that weaker theta and gamma oscillations were related to greater visuospatial performance deficits across both groups. We propose that the weaker occipital oscillations seen in children with CP may reflect poor bottom-up processing of incoming visual information, which subsequently affects the higher-order visual computations essential for accurate visual perception and integration for decision-making.

Weaker Connectivity of the Cortical Networks Is Linked with the Uncharacteristic Gait in Youth with Cerebral Palsy

“…In fact, visual dysfunction is now recognized as a core, co-occurring disorder affecting between 50% and 90% of individuals with CP [46][47][48][49]. This is also consistent with our previous works in MEG showing that children with CP had weaker cortical oscillations in the visual MT/V5 cortices and occipital cortices [6][7][8]. The altered connectivity seen between the motor and visual cortices might be partially a result of the white matter damage often seen in the peritrigonal region, as the optic radiation fibers are neighbors to the corticospinal tracts in this area [50].…”

“…Another notable result of the study was the fact that the visual cortex was consistently found to be abnormally connected to the other two primary cortices (namely, the motor and auditory cortices). Both functional and structural studies have reported abnormalities related to the visual network [6][7][8]26,29] and visual tracks [30,45] in CP. Our finding supports the idea that the disconnectivity of the visual network from the other primary networks might reflect a pathophysiological mechanism leading to visual perception impairment in CP.…”

“…The breadth of the muscular performance and sensory acuity deficiencies in youth with CP have largely fueled the impression that the altered spatiotemporal gait biomechanics primarily originate from aberrations in sensorimotor cortical activity [2][3][4][5]. Despite this impression, a growing body of literature has highlighted that youth with CP also have altered activity in the primary occipital cortices and visual MT areas while processing visual stimuli [6][7][8]. These studies imply that the perinatal insult likely impacts several key brain networks that expend beyond the sensorimotor cortices.…”

Visuospatial alpha and gamma oscillations scale with the severity of cognitive dysfunction in patients on the Alzheimer’s disease spectrum

“…Participants completed 240 trials of a visuospatial discrimination task (Fig. 1 , top), which has been extensively described and validated in previous work [ 12 , 14 – 16 , 20 , 21 , 47 ], concurrent with MEG recording. During this task, participants were seated in a magnetically shielded room and indicated the position of a grid by a right-handed button press (left = index finger; right = middle finger).…”

Altered Neural Oscillations Underlying Visuospatial Processing in Cerebral Visual Impairment (CVI)

“…To our knowledge, studies investigating electrophysiological activity (beyond VEP recordings) in relation to higher order visual processing in CVI remain limited. A recent study by verMass and colleagues (2021) investigated children with CVI associated with cerebral palsy (CP) and used magnetoencephalography (MEG) to uncover oscillatory activity associated with visuospatial processing abilities 68 . Consistent with the findings reported here, the authors found that participants with CP had weaker theta (as well as gamma) occipital activity related to impaired performance on their visuospatial processing and attention task.…”