Object-based visual processing in children with spina bifida and hydrocephalus: a cognitive neuropsychological analysis.

The aim of the study was to use cognitive neuropsychological analysis to investigate object-based visual processing skills in children with spina bifida myelomeningocele and hydrocephalus (SBH). Fourteen children with SBH (aged 8-12) and 21 age-, socio-economic status-, and Verbal IQ-matched healthy controls were assessed using the Birmingham Object Recognition Battery. Overall, the performance of the children with SBH on the object-processing tasks was intact, indicating normal development of the ventral visual processing pathway. While the initial results indicated that the children with SBH performed statistically significantly less accurately on some tasks, these group differences no longer met significance criteria after capacity for sustained attention was statistically controlled.