Assessment of motor imagery in cerebral palsy via mental chronometry: the case of walking.
Kids with CP can mentally walk a path as fast as they physically walk it, so use this intact imagery to preview new motor skills.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Spruijt et al. (2013) asked the kids with cerebral palsy to walk and to imagine walking. The kids were 8-18 years old and could walk without help.
The team timed how long each real walk took. Then they asked the child to imagine the same walk and press a button when they 'arrived.' They tested three walking paths: easy, medium, and hard.
What they found
Real walks and imagined walks took the same time. The harder paths took longer, but the match stayed tight.
The kids with CP could picture walking in their minds just as accurately as they could do it.
How this fits with other research
Chen et al. (2018) saw the same tight match in teens with autism, but their imagined hand turns were slower than real ones. Both studies show kids with neurodevelopmental disorders can use motor imagery; CP kids keep the speed, ASD kids lose a little.
Hung et al. (2014) went further. They had kids with unilateral CP walk while carrying a box. Gait fell apart under the dual task. Steffie’s kids only did single-task imagery, so the new work warns us that real-life loads may break the neat picture.
Lennon et al. (2015) tell us the 6-minute walk test is weak for fitness in adults with CP. Steffie’s mental chronometry gives us a different, low-cost tool: just ask the child to ‘walk’ in their head.
Why it matters
You can start therapy with a quick ‘imagine walk’ check. If the child’s mind-walk time matches real time, their motor plan is intact. Use that intact imagery to rehearse new paths before physical practice. When you add real loads later, watch for the dual-task drop Ya-Ching found.
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Join Free →Have the client walk a short hallway, then close their eyes and ‘walk’ it in their mind while you time them; match within a large share means their motor imagery is ready for rehearsal drills.
02At a glance
03Original abstract
Recent studies show varying results on whether motor imagery capacity is compromised in individuals with cerebral palsy (CP). Motor imagery studies in children predominantly used the implicit hand laterality task. In this task participants judge the laterality of displayed hand stimuli. A more explicit way of studying motor imagery is mental chronometry. This paradigm is based on the comparison between the movement durations of actually performing a task and imagining the same task. The current study explored motor imagery capacity in CP by means of mental chronometry of a whole body task. Movement durations of 20 individuals with CP (mean age=13 years, SD=3.6) were recorded in two conditions: actual walking and imagined walking. Six unique trajectories were used that varied in difficulty via manipulation of walking distance and path width. We found no main effect of condition (actual walking versus imagining) on movement durations. Difficulty of the walking trajectory did affect movement durations. In general, this was expressed by an increase in movement durations with increasing difficulty of the task. No interaction between task difficulty and movement condition was found. Our results show that task difficulty has similar effects on movement durations for both actual walking and imagined walking. These results exemplify that the tested individuals were able to use motor imagery in an explicit task involving walking. Previous studies using the implicit hand laterality task showed varying results on motor imagery capacity in CP. We therefore conclude that motor imagery capacity is task dependent and that an explicit paradigm as the one used in this study may reveal the true motor imagery capacity. The implications of these findings for the use of motor imagery training are discussed.
Research in developmental disabilities, 2013 · doi:10.1016/j.ridd.2013.08.044