Inhibitory control and temporal perception in cerebral palsy

ABSTRACT

Prepotent response inhibition and temporal perception abilities were explored in a sample of individuals with cerebral palsy relative to typically developing peers. The extent to which inhibitory control difficulties might affect temporal processing was also investigated. For this purpose, two inhibitory control tasks and two duration estimation tasks were given to the groups of cerebral palsy and typically developing children. Results showed inhibition and temporal perception problems in the group with cerebral palsy. A relationship was found between inhibition and temporal estimation performances, which indicates that inhibitory control contributes, at least partially, to acquisition of the temporal processing ability.

KEYWORDS:

• Cerebral palsy
• temporal perception
• executive functioning
• cognitive development
• response inhibition

Acknowledgments

We are grateful to the children who took part in this study. We also thank BOBATH Foundation for their help and involvement in this project.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

¹ The only new thing we added to the method of Christ et al. (2003) was a blue square at the beginning of each trial in the middle of the screen as a fixation point, to help the child fix his or her eyes and focus his/her attention on the task (see Figure5).

² Note that these correlations reflect relationships among mental age and temporal measures within each group, not between group differences in mental age, which were controlled. This issue is considered in the Discussion section.

³ The proportion of explained variance for the reproduction task in the CP group was .54, but the increment of R² after introducing the inhibitory variable was .14.