Twenty weeks of computer-training improves sense of agency in children with spastic cerebral palsy.
Twenty weeks of daily half-hour online games sharpened the sense of control in kids with CP.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Kids with spastic cerebral palsy played 30-minute online games every day for twenty weeks.
The games mixed moving, seeing, and thinking tasks that let kids feel they were moving objects on the screen.
Researchers used a coin-flip style computer draw to decide who started the games right away and who waited.
What they found
After twenty weeks the game group could better tell when they, not the computer, made an object move.
The kids’ sense of control, called agency, grew stronger with the daily short practice.
How this fits with other research
Bondár et al. (2020) also sent help through the computer, but they coached mothers instead of training kids.
Jeng et al. (2013) showed that a one-time twelve-week home exercise plan kept fitness gains for ten years.
Together the papers say online or home programs can help both children and parents with CP when sessions are steady.
Why it matters
You can add brief online agency games to any CP rehab plan without extra travel.
Try a five-minute warm-up game that asks the child to move a cursor and then asks, “Did you move it or did the computer?”
Track the answer each week to see if the child’s sense of control, and maybe motor effort, is growing.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
Children with cerebral palsy (CP) show alteration of perceptual and cognitive abilities in addition to motor and sensory deficits, which may include altered sense of agency. The aim of this study was to evaluate whether 20 weeks of internet-based motor, perceptual and cognitive training enhances the ability of CP children to determine whether they or a computer are responsible for the movement of a visually observed object. 40 CP children (8-16 years) were divided into a training (n:20) and control group (n:20). The training group trained 30 min each day for 20 weeks. The ability of the children to judge whether they themselves or a computer were responsible for moving an object on a computer screen was tested before and after the 20-week period. Furthermore, we included a healthy age-matched group to determine a normal functional level of performance. Our results showed a significantly larger increase in the number of correct subjective reporting for the training group (p<0.001). In accordance with this, the training group was also less fooled by computer-induced movements given by a decreased curvature which indicated a compensatory motor strategy when drawing the line to hit the target following the training than the control group (p=0.018). These findings suggest that sense of agency may be altered, and that training of sense of agency may help to increase the outcome of training programmes in children with CP.
Research in developmental disabilities, 2012 · doi:10.1016/j.ridd.2012.02.019