Multidimensionality and specificity of neuropsychological body representations in children with hemiplegic cerebral palsy

• Autor(a) principal: Thalita Karla Flores Cruz
• Data de Publicação: 2020
• Tipo de documento: Tese
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Institucional da UFMG
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/1843/34280; https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5656-2593
• topic: Body representation; Body schema; Body structural description; Body image; Hemiplegic cerebral palsy; Neurociências; Paralisia cerebral; Imagem corporal; Criança

One relevant disorder presented by children with hemiplegic cerebral palsy (HCP) is the impairment of body representations. The processing of body-related knowledge comprises three distinct levels of body representations: body schema (BS), body structural description (BSD) and body image (BI). BS provides on-line information about body parts, BSD allows the individual to specify the position and limits of each part of the body and BI contains semantic and lexical information about body parts. Despite the relevance of body representations to action execution, self-representation and social interactions, few studies have systematically explored the impairments of body representations in children with HCP. The main goals of this dissertation are to investigate possible interactions among body representations during the development of BI, and to investigate distinct subtypes of impairments in body representation (especially, selective deficits in body representation levels) in children with HCP. First, a review was conducted presenting the investigation that was carried out on the evidence for the multiple and distinct body representations. To investigate our main goal, three empirical studies were conducted. In the first study, the developmental structure of lexical-semantic body knowledge (operationalized from the fluency tasks of words related to body) in children with typical development was explored. Qualitative analysis of the semantic network of the body parts category suggests an influence of infant sensorimotor development on the development of BI. In the second study, the performance of children with typical development was compared with that of children with HCP to investigate the development of BI in children with HCP. Children with HCP presented a representational profile of BI (as reflected by their performance in the semantic fluency task), which seemed equivalent to that of younger children with typical development. However, they performed significantly worse than children with typical development of the same age. Such findings allow us to suggest that sensorimotor and visual impairments, frequently present in HCP, influences BI development. In the third study, both bottom-up and top-down approaches were performed to investigate whether children with HCP present impairments of body representation in specific levels, and to identify possible selective impairments in body representation. In the present study, we found four main groups of distinct body representation profiles and 22 cases of selective impairment in body representation levels. The findings of this dissertation provide evidence that models of body representation derived from studies of adults are also helpful in enabling the understanding of body representation disorders in childhood. In addition, these results provide an important contribution regarding body representation impairments in children with HCP.