Rhythm and Multisensoriality's Effects on the Motor Development in Children With Cerebral Palsy

Overview

Cerebral palsy (CP) affects the motor function but also the cognitive function of the child. Physical activity brings motor and cognitive benefits and appears as an important aspect of the therapy that is offered to them. The child is seating in front of a computer, seating comfortably on a chair during 1 hour. The experimental task consists in learning a sequence of taps on "Serial reaction time task" type buzzers (SRTT) in which the child must press a buzzer corresponding to one of the 4 squares that on the screen. The sequence corresponds to 10 steps in a particular order.

Cerebral palsy (CP) affects the motor function but also the cognitive function of the child. Physical activity brings motor and cognitive benefits and appears as an important aspect of the therapy that is offered to them. In particular, the learning of movements in the presence of multisensory rhythmic information seems to have beneficial effects at the cognitive and motor level. The present study aims to test the respective effects of rhythm and multisensoriality on motor learning in children with cerebral palsy. The motor learning task is known as the "Serial Reaction Time Task" (SRTT). It consists in repeating a sequence of movements of the upper limbs using visual-spatial information alone (V). It will test the addition of synchronous auditory stimulation to visual information or rhythmic auditory stimulation(VAR), to contrast with a control condition with non-rhythmic auditory stimulation (VANR). The performance of the children will be measured by the reaction time (RT), its stability and the number of errors made throughout the motor learning. The child is placed in front of a screen on which 4 luminous stimuli are presented on a horizontal plane. Four buzzers are placed in front of him, each buzzer corresponds to the position of a stimulus. The stimuli light up in a predetermined sequence (10 positions) and the child must press the buzzer corresponding to the position of the stimulus that comes on. Four blocks of 5 sequences are repeated to test the general learning (B1 to B4) and then a block of random stimuli is presented to test the specific learning of the sequence (B5).