COGNITIVE PROCESSING OF SENSORY STIMULI IN CERVICAL DYSTONIA

Objective: Investigation of spatial and temporal recognition in Cervical Dystonia (CD). Methods: Four neuropsychological tasks, based on perception in time and space domains of visual and acoustic stimuli, were given to twenty-two CD patients and twenty-two age-matched healthy controls (C). Repeated measure ANOVA was run on group (CD, C), either pooling type of task (spatial, temporal) and type of stimuli (visual, acoustic) factors coming from all tasks either investigating single tasks. Results: In pooled analysis we found that CD were less accurate than C (F¼6.080, p¼0.018). In particular CD were worse in spatial-acoustic task (F¼5.839, p¼0.020). Significant differences were detected, evaluating reaction times, in spatial-visual task as well as in temporal-visual tasks. By considering a congruent, incongruent (opposite) or uninformative directional cue before actual stimuli, an interaction involving groups and congruency level was also found (F¼4.540, p¼0.016). This was caused by reaction times decreasing in CD during incongruent condition. C were faster than CD in temporal-visual task (F¼4.852, p¼0.035). Conclusions: This study demonstrate that CD show spatial and temporal higher cognitive impairment when processing visual and acoustic stimuli suggesting that specific neural-rehabilitative treatment should be conceived to compensate for these perceptual deficits.