Gaze responses in children with cerebral palsy, cerebral visual impairment, and severe intellectual and developmental disabilities

Children with severe cerebral palsy, cerebral visual impairment (CVI), and significant developmental disabilities have significantly impaired visual function and their caretakers are challenged in understanding how best to engage the residual vision they have. Our study looked for ways to assess and better understand their visual functioning by using a variety of sensory inputs.

The study included 40 children with severe cerebral palsy, and intellectual and developmental disabilities; 20 of whom also had CVI. In a darkened room, they were presented with simple sensory inputs (a light, a sound, or a touch) individually or in pairs (light and sound; light with touch). Computerized video analysis enabled precise measurement of how often, for how long, and how quickly they looked at the stimuli.

Children with CVI often took longer to respond to visual stimuli and overall held their gaze for a shorter time compared to children without CVI.

Most importantly, children with CVI looked more often and for a longer time to multisensory stimuli (sound with light) compared to auditory alone. This ‘sensory enhancement’ suggests that using more than one sense at a time can help capture their visual attention. Both groups looked longest toward the sound of a human voice and to an object held in their own hand, compared to the other sound and touch stimuli.