Motor imagery for walking: a comparison between cerebral palsy adolescents with hemiplegia and diplegia.
Mental walking breaks down past four meters in CP teens, so test imagery accuracy before you use it in therapy.
01Research in Context
What this study did
The team asked teens with cerebral palsy to imagine walking four and eight meters. They timed how long the teens thought each walk would take.
They compared these imagined times to real walking times and to healthy peers. The goal was to see if the teens could picture the moves in their heads.
What they found
At four meters, the CP teens were close to real time, but still slower than peers. At eight meters, their mental picture broke down and times were way off.
Kids with diplegia had more trouble than kids with hemiplegia. Longer distances made the gap bigger.
How this fits with other research
Spruijt et al. (2013) saw no gap at all between imagined and real walking in their CP sample. The new study adds distance as a key factor: short walks match, long walks fail.
Gofer-Levi et al. (2013) showed CP kids struggle to learn movement sequences without noticing. Together, the papers say the motor mind needs extra support in CP.
Hung et al. (2014) found gait falls apart when kids carry a box while walking. Both studies warn that added load—real or mental—can overload the system.
Why it matters
If you use mental practice, keep the walk under four meters and check each teen first. Start short, confirm accuracy, then slowly add distance. This guards against teaching a wrong picture and keeps motivation high.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
The goal of the study was to investigate whether motor imagery (MI) could be observed in cerebral palsy (CP) participants presenting a bilateral affected body side (diplegia) as it has been previously revealed in participants presenting a unilateral body affected sided (hemiplegia). MI capacity for walking was investigated in CP adolescents diagnosed with hemiplegia (n=10) or diplegia (n=10) and in adolescents with typical motor development (n=10). Participants were explicitly asked to imagine walking before and after actually walking toward a target located at 4 m and 8 m. Movement durations for executed and imagined trials were recorded. ANOVA and Pearson's correlation analyses revealed the existence of time invariance between executed and imagined movement durations for the control group and both groups of CP participants. However, results revealed that MI capacity in CP participants was observed for the short distance (4 m) but not for the long distance (8 m). Moreover, even for short distance, CP participants performed worse than typical adolescents. These results are discussed inline of recent researches suggesting that MI in CP participants may not depend on the side of the lesion.
Research in developmental disabilities, 2015 · doi:10.1016/j.ridd.2014.10.053