Mental imagery abilities in adolescents with spastic diplegic cerebral palsy

Four visual imagery tasks were presented to three groups of adolescents with or without spastic diplegic cerebral palsy. The first group was composed of six adolescents with cerebral palsy who had associated visual-perceptual deficits (CP-PD), the second group was composed of five adolescents with cerebral palsy and no associated visual-perceptual deficits (CP), and the third group comprised ten control participants. Results revealed a marked slowdown of visual imagery processing in the CP-PD group only. They suggested that cerebral palsy is not systematically associated with visual imagery deficits, and that the presence or absence of such deficits depends on the existence of associated perceptual deficits.