Lacroix Emilie, Edwards Martin Gareth, De Volder Anne, Noël Marie-Pascale, Rombaux Philippe, Deggouj Naima
Oto-Rhino-Laryngology Department, Cliniques Universitaires Saint-Luc, Brussels, Belgium.
Institute of Neuroscience (IONS), Université Catholique de Louvain, Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium.
J Vestib Res. 2020;30(1):25-33. doi: 10.3233/VES-200689.
The impact of vestibular loss (VL) on cognition has been previously studied in experimental animal, human and adult patient studies showing links between VL, and cognitive impairments in space orientation, working memory, mental rotation and selective attention. However, few studies have been conducted on children with VL.
We investigated for the first time, the impact of a VL on children's cognition.
13 children with VL (10 years, 5 months) and 60 average-age matched controls performed a neuropsychological assessment consisting of visuospatial working memory, selective visual attention, mental rotation and space orientation tasks.
Children with VL recalled smaller sequences for both forward and backward memory subtasks (mean±SD = 6.3±1.9 and 5.3±2.6) than controls (8.2±2.3 and 7.3±2.0), have less accurate mental rotation scores (25.4±6 versus 30.8±5.1) and greater additional distance travelled in the maze task (96.4±66.6 versus 60.4±66.3); all corrected p-values <0.05. Selective visual attention measures do not show significant differences.
Children with VL show similar cognitive difficulties that adults with VL, in tasks involving dynamic cognitive processes (higher attentional load) that in tasks requiring static cognitive processes such as visual attention task.
前庭功能丧失（VL）对认知的影响此前已在实验动物、人类及成年患者研究中得到探讨，这些研究表明VL与空间定向、工作记忆、心理旋转及选择性注意方面的认知障碍之间存在关联。然而，针对VL儿童的研究较少。
我们首次调查了VL对儿童认知的影响。
13名VL儿童（10岁5个月）和60名年龄匹配的正常儿童进行了神经心理学评估，包括视觉空间工作记忆、选择性视觉注意、心理旋转及空间定向任务。
VL儿童在向前和向后记忆子任务中回忆的序列较短（均值±标准差=6.3±1.9和5.3±2.6），低于对照组（8.2±2.3和7.3±2.0），心理旋转得分准确性较低（25.4±6对30.8±5.1），在迷宫任务中行进的额外距离更远（96.4±66.6对60.4±66.3）；所有校正p值<0.05。选择性视觉注意测量未显示出显著差异。
VL儿童在涉及动态认知过程（注意力负荷较高）的任务中表现出与VL成人相似的认知困难，而在需要静态认知过程的任务如视觉注意任务中则不然。
