The development of body representations in school-aged children

Body Representations in Children with Cerebral Palsy

“…A group of 103 typically-developing children (TDC), similar in age (mean = 8.04 years; SD = 1.28 years; Manney-Whitney U = 1404.00; p = 0.128) and sex (49 boys; 54 girls; χ 2 = 2.582; p = 0.108) with the CP group, was enrolled. The control sample overlaps with that of a previous study of our research group [ 4 ] for children between 7 and 10 years.…”

“…Body representations (i.e., Body Semantics, Body Structural Representation and Body Schema) were evaluated by means of experimental tasks previously used by our research group in a study on the development of body representations in typically developing children [ 4 ]. Here we used the same apparatus, tasks and procedures described in Raimo and colleagues [ 4 ], to which reference is made for further details.…”

“…As suggested in Bonato and colleagues ([ 15 ]; see the introduction for details), in order to take into account the role of cognitive abilities not specifically related to the body processing that could affect performance in tasks assessing body representation, three control tasks were also used. In particular, following the approach previously utilized in other studies aimed at investigating body-related processes (see for example [ 7 , 23 , 24 ]), for each task involving body stimuli, a control task with the same presentation and administration procedures/scoring but with non-body (i.e., object) stimuli was used, that is: The Object-Room Association Task [ 4 ], assessing the semantic processing of non-body stimuli. The participant had to match an object with a room, choosing between two options.…”

“…The body mental representation is a complex process, determined by the interaction of information coming from many different stimuli inside and outside the body [ 1 , 2 ]. A discrete amount of data, including neuropsychological studies on patients with brain damage (e.g., Reference [ 3 ]), neuroimaging studies on healthy individuals (e.g., Reference [ 1 ]) and developmental studies on healthy children (e.g., References [ 4 , 5 ]), suggests that there is no a single representation of the body in the cortex. In particular, referring to the so-called triadic taxonomy [ 3 , 6 ] we have to distinguish between the Body Schema, which arise from sensory-motor information and it is fundamental to action’s planning and execution; the Body Structural Representation, a topographic map of the different body parts, and the Body Semantics, essentially a conceptual and linguistic representation of the body.…”

“…In sum, although the few studies mentioned above converge in highlighting the presence of body representation deficits in children/adolescents with CP, to the best of our knowledge, no study investigated these representations taking into account the role of a possible deficitperformance in other cognitive domains. Raimo and colleagues [ 4 ] investigated this issue in the development of body representations in healthy children from 7 to 10 years old, finding that Body Semantics was completely developed in typically-developing children between 7 and 8 years old. By the age of 9–10 years, children reach an adult-like pattern also in the Body Structural Representation, while the Body Schema was still not completely developed in this range of age.…”