Interception refers to goal-directed motor actions aimed at interacting with moving objects and is essential for both motor co-ordination and social engagement. In childhood, interceptive skills support environmental exploration, peer interaction, and participation in play and sports. For children with visual impairments, the lack of visual cues compromises the development of these skills, potentially limiting motor competence and opportunities for social interaction.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFReach-to-grasp behavior is a key developmental milestone in infants, involving coordinated actions such as arm transport, hand pre-shaping, and hand opening and closing. Vision guides the development of these skills, and delays in visual input can impact infants with early visual impairments. However, the effects of a congenital visual impairment on reach-to-grasp behavior in early life remain largely unexplored.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFSleep health is a topic of great interest in recent years. However, it is still often undervalued in vulnerable populations, such as those with sensory disorders. A higher percentage of blind individuals experience circadian disorders, and their dreams have different sensory contents.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIntroduction: Children with septo-optic-pituitary dysplasia (SOD) may experience a range of visual impairments and hormonal dysfunctions beyond developmental delay/intellectual disability. The literature describes sleep fragmentation, circadian rhythm disruptions and reduced sleep efficiency. These manifestations are believed to be closely linked to both structural and functional abnormalities associated with SOD, potentially disrupting the natural circadian rhythm.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe relationship between cerebral rhythms and early sensorimotor development is not clear. In recent decades, evidence revealed a rhythmic modulation involving sensorimotor processing. A widely corroborated functional role of oscillatory activity is to coordinate the information flow across sensorimotor networks.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFSleep plays a crucial role in brain development, sensory information processing, and consolidation. Sleep spindles are markers of these mechanisms as they mirror the activity of the thalamocortical circuits. Spindles can be subdivided into two groups, slow (10-13 Hz) and fast (13-16 Hz), which are each associated with different functions.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFObjective/background: Ketogenic dietary therapies' effects on sleep have been poorly investigated up to date. Preliminary results of a prospective study aimed at evaluating possible sleep changes in pediatric patients with migraine treated with classic ketogenic diet are presented.
Patients/methods: Included patients were aged 14-18 years and had a diagnosis of chronic migraine.
Sleep problems are common in neurological conditions for which ketogenic dietary therapies (KDTs) are recognised as an effective intervention (drug-resistant epilepsy, autism spectrum disorder, and migraine). Given the composite framework of action of ketogenic dietary therapies, the prevalence of sleep disturbance, and the importance of sleep regulation, the present scoping review aimed at identifying and mapping available evidence of the effects of ketogenic dietary therapies on sleep. A comprehensive web-based literature search was performed retrieving publications published to June 2023 using PubMed and Scopus, yielding to 277 records.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFUnlabelled: The mechanisms involved in the origin of dreams remain one of the great unknowns in science. In the 21st century, studies in the field have focused on 3 main topics: functional networks that underlie dreaming, neural correlates of dream contents, and signal propagation. We review neuroscientific studies about dreaming processes, focusing on their cortical correlations.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFVisual experience is crucial for the development of neural processing. For example, alpha activity development is a vision-dependent mechanism. Indeed, studies report no alpha activity is present in blind adults.
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