Cortical oscillations that underlie visual selective attention are abnormal in adolescents with cerebral palsy

Abstract

Adolescence is a critical period for the development and refinement of several higher-level cognitive functions, including visual selective attention. Clinically, it has been noted that adolescents with cerebral palsy (CP) may have deficits in selectively attending to objects within their visual field. This study aimed to evaluate the neural oscillatory activity in the ventral attention network while adolescents with CP performed a visual selective attention task. Adolescents with CP (N = 14; Age = 15.7 ± 4 years; MACS I–III; GMFCS I–IV) and neurotypical (NT) adolescents (N = 21; Age = 14.3 ± 2 years) performed the Eriksen flanker task while undergoing magnetoencephalographic (MEG) brain imaging. The participants reported the direction of a target arrow that was surrounded by congruent or incongruent flanking arrows. Compared with NT adolescents, adolescents with CP had slower responses and made more errors regarding the direction of the target arrow. The MEG results revealed that adolescents with CP had stronger alpha oscillations in the left insula when the flanking arrows were incongruent. Furthermore, participants that had more errors also tended to have stronger alpha oscillatory activity in this brain region. Altogether these results indicate that the aberrant activity seen in the left insula is associated with diminished visual selective attention function in adolescents with CP.

Comparison of Executive Function Skills between Patients with Cerebral Palsy and Typically Developing Populations: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis

“…In fact, when we pooled the studies that applied matching, only a medium-sized effect was found for inhibitory control; however, the large effect on working memory remained. Additionally, similar effects were found for verbal [26,27,31,34,36] and visuospatial working memory [26][27][28][29]31,32,[35][36][37][38][39], and for measures of shifting [26,29,31,36,37,39] and planning [26,36]. In sum, we confirmed the results of previous studies [13][14][15][16] showing substantial deficits in EF skills in CP.…”

“…We found strong agreement between reviewers in selecting studies based on full texts (Cohen's kappa = 0.92). The characteristics of the included studies are shown in Table 1 [25][26][27][28][29][30][31][32][33][34][35][36][37][38][39]. * GMFCS: Mild = at least 80% of the CP participants belong to GMFCS level I, II, III according to the article.…”

“…It should be noted that the confidence intervals were large and overlapping, so we cannot conclude that individuals with CP experience a smaller deficit in cognitive flexibility than in working memory and inhibitory control. Furthermore, a methodological issue was found to have an effect: studies that matched [26,27,29,31,33,34,36,37,39] the control group to the CP group by age and sex found a smaller difference than studies that did not report on such matching [25,28,30,32,35,38]. Thus, it is also important to note that all studies reporting on a measure of cognitive flexibility applied to the matching of controls and the CP group, whereas studies on working memory and inhibitory control were mixed in this regard.…”

“…The 15 articles [25][26][27][28][29][30][31][32][33][34][35][36][37][38][39] include 6 high-, 4 moderate-and 5 low-risk studies. For further details see Figure 6.…”

Aberrant movement‐related somatosensory cortical activity mediates the extent of the mobility impairments in persons with cerebral palsy

“…divided attention in active condition), nor group differences in attention (i.e. reduced attention function in CP) (Hoffman et al., 2021; VerMaas et al., 2020). As opposed to attention, it is more probable that the attenuation of the somatosensory cortical responses was dependent on efferent signals induced by a motor command inhibiting the sensory afferent signals, a mechanism referred to as centrifugal gating or central gating (Jones et al., 1989; Wasaka et al., 2003; Saradjian, 2015).…”