Affordances after spinal cord injury

Area of Science:

• Neuroscience
• Cognitive Psychology
• Rehabilitation Science

Background:

• Spinal cord injury (SCI) can lead to cognitive impairments, potentially linked to altered spatial perception and interaction with the environment.
• Peripersonal space, the space around the body, is encoded in motor terms and relates to action capabilities and environmental affordances.
• It is hypothesized that motor-related cognitive abilities, including spatial perception, may be compromised by the loss of typical mobility.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate how paraplegia affects the perception of peripersonal space and reachability affordances.
• To compare spatial cognition and action-related property decoding in individuals with SCI and healthy controls.

Main Methods:

• Employed an affordances-related reachability judgment task adapted from previous research.
• Administered neuropsychological tests to 10 patients with paraplegia and 20 matched controls.
• Assessed accuracy, judgment variability, and response speed in peripersonal space boundary estimation.

Main Results:

• Patients with paraplegia and controls exhibited similar accuracy in estimating peripersonal space boundaries.
• Controls showed a typical overestimation of reaching range, which was absent in patients.
• Patients displayed higher variability in judgments, correlating with everyday task performance, and lacked the speed advantage seen in controls.

Conclusions:

• Reduced mobility due to SCI impacts the decoding of action-related environmental properties, even when upper limb function is intact.
• Altered interaction with the environment in a non-canonical posture (wheelchair use) may contribute to these motor-related cognitive differences.
• Findings highlight the intricate link between motor abilities, spatial cognition, and environmental interaction in individuals with SCI.