Ocular motility and visuo-spatial attention in children with periventricular leukomalacia.

Periventricular leukomalacia (PVL) is known to cause visual, motor, and cognitive impairments varying in their severity. Most studies focused on impairment at early ages. Little is known about the PVL's later outcome. Effects of neural plasticity are for instance insufficiently known to prognose precisely their behavioral outcome. It is even hard to determine the consequence of one defect on global development over time. Because of the established neural link between eye motion and space perception, 5-to-9 year-old PVL's were tested in visual detection, postural control, and space attention tasks. In this paper, discussion will focus on behavioral asymmetry, developmental outcome, and brain injury.