Judgment of line orientation in children with congenital unilateral lesions

The Judgment of Line Orientation test (JLO) is widely used to assess visuospatial processing. To investigate whether JLO is impaired compared to the normal population, whether it is worse if the lesion affects right-hemisphere or cerebral structures involved in JLO processing in adults, and how JLO correlates with the extent of the lesion, Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children (WISC) IQs and WISC subtests, we assessed 20 children with congenital unilateral lesion (12 left and 8 right). Only 50% of our children had a borderline or significantly impaired performance in the JLO test, with a prevalence of females and left-hemisphere-impaired participants. The brain areas affected do not generally coincide with the network identified by functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) on healthy adults, suggesting that the neural correlates are distributed differently in children depending on their age and on functional reorganization. Further research, including functional studies on larger samples of children of different age groups, are needed to elucidate the network subserving this ability in developmental age.