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.
Highlights
Adolescence is a critical period for the development and refinement of several higher-level cognitive functions, including visual selective attention
There was a significant main effect of condition for the reaction time, which is consistent with the well-established “flanker effect” indicating that the adolescents took longer to respond during the incongruent compared to the congruent condition, likely due to the visually distracting flanking arrows
Overall our experimental results for the NT adolescents and those with cerebral palsy (CP) were well aligned with the prior MEG experimental outcomes using this task, which have shown there is an alpha event-related desynchronization (ERD) in the left insula and a theta event-related synchronization (ERS) in the right middle frontal gyrus during task performance[11,12,13,14,15,16]
Summary
Adolescence is a critical period for the development and refinement of several higher-level cognitive functions, including visual selective attention. Participants that had more errors tended to have stronger alpha oscillatory activity in this brain region These results indicate that the aberrant activity seen in the left insula is associated with diminished visual selective attention function in adolescents with CP. The current view is that the impairments in visual perception often seen in adolescents with CP may result from acuity, retinopathy of prematurity, and/or strabismus[6,7] Such visual deficits may disrupt the ability to selectively attend to a visual stimulus while performing goal-oriented motor behaviors. Despite the growing recognition of the role of the ventral attention network, we have limited knowledge about the function of this network in individuals with CP This investigation used MEG brain imaging and advanced image reconstruction methods to evaluate cortical oscillations within the ventral attention network as adolescents with CP performed an arrow-based version of the flanker visual selective attention task. We hypothesized that (1) the visual attention-related cortical oscillations would be aberrant in adolescents with CP compared with neurotypical (NT) adolescents, and (2) that these atypical cortical oscillations would be tightly coupled with the speed and accuracy of their behavioral response on the direction of the target arrow
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