Role of Visual and Proprioceptive Information in Motor Control in Cerebral Palsy

Abstract

Adult cerebral palsied (CP) and normal subjects performed visual and/or proprioceptive matching tasks. In the CP subjects, EMG from upper limbs of the dominant hand and elbow joint angle were recorded. The CP group produced higher errors when they performed tasks utilizing visual information than when utilizing only proprioceptive information and this result suggests a difficulty in sensory integration. When utilizing visual information, an athetosis subject showed the presence of involuntary movement with hypertonus and a spastic subject showed inadequate settings of target location. Moreover, the performances of the static matching condition and visual memory dependent matching condition were good, especially in athetosis subjects.