Caregivers of children with neurodevelopmental disorders play a central role during the rehabilitation and education processes, but they have an increasing risk of psychosocial problems even if the literature is not so agreed upon the specific and predisposing factors to that. The aim of this study was to examine possibly differences of burden levels in an Italian sample of principal caregivers of children with different kinds of neurodevelopmental disorders and to investigate the possible links between some clinical and sociodemographic variables and the levels of caregiver’s burden. 105 caregivers of school-aged children with neurodevelopmental disorders were included in the study and completed three online questionnaires (General Questionnaire, Caregiver Burden Inventory, Zarit Caregiver Burden Scale). Results highlighted that about the half of caregivers show from moderate to high levels of stress, but parents of children with Autism Spectrum Disorder and Intellectual Disability show greater difficulties than parents of children with Attention-Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, Language and/or Learning Disorder, and Developmental Coordination Disorder. Moreover, it was evident a negative correlation between the burden levels and the age of children, but also a direct correlation between the burden levels and the weekly hours of rehabilitation. These findings show that severity of caregiver’s burden is dependent by the type of neurodevelopmental disorder and suggest that an ecological and family-centred approach is necessary to guarantee the life health developmental course of these children.

To systematically explore the relationship between type and severity of brain lesion on Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) and visual function in a large cohort of children with periventricular leukomalacia (PVL). 94 children with bilateral cerebral palsy (CP) and history of PVL were recruited at Stella Maris Scientific Institute in Pisa (Italy). We included data of participants (72) with at least one MRI after the age of three years and an evaluation of visual function including fixation, following, saccades, nystagmus, acuity, visual field, stereopsis and color perception. Brain lesions location and extent were assessed by a semi-quantitative MRI-scale for children with CP. Brain lesion severity strongly correlated with visual function total score (global MRI score p = .000; hemispheric score p = .001 and subcortical score p = .000). Moreover, visual acuity, visual field, stereopsis and colour were compromised when a cortical damage was present, while ocular motricity (and in particular fixation and saccades) were compromised in presence of subcortical brain damage. Structural MRI is valuable for understanding the relationship between brain lesion severity and visual function in children with CP.

Multisensory processes permit combinations of several inputs, coming from different sensory systems, allowing for a coherent representation of biological events and facilitating adaptation to environment. For these reasons, their application in neurological and neuropsychological rehabilitation has been enhanced in the last decades. Recent studies on animals and human models have indicated that, on one hand multisensory integration matures gradually during post-natal life and development is closely linked to environment and experience and, on the other hand, that modality-specific information seems to do not benefit by redundancy across multiple sense modalities and is more readily perceived in unimodal than in multimodal stimulation. In this review, multisensory process development is analyzed, highlighting clinical effects in animal and human models of its manipulation for rehabilitation of sensory disorders. In addition, new methods of early intervention based on multisensory-based rehabilitation approach and their applications on different infant populations at risk of neurodevelopmental disabilities are discussed.

Object recognition is a long and complex adaptive process and its full maturation requires combination of many different sensory experiences as well as cognitive abilities to manipulate previous experiences in order to develop new percepts and subsequently to learn from the environment. It is well recognized that the transfer of visual and haptic information facilitates object recognition in adults, but less is known about development of this ability. In this study, we explored the developmental course of object recognition capacity in children using unimodal visual information, unimodal haptic information, and visuo-haptic information transfer in children from 4 years to 10 years and 11 months of age. Participants were tested through a clinical protocol, involving visual exploration of black-and-white photographs of common objects, haptic exploration of real objects, and visuo-haptic transfer of these two types of information. Results show an age-dependent development of object recognition abilities for visual, haptic, and visuo-haptic modalities. A significant effect of time on development of unimodal and crossmodal recognition skills was found. Moreover, our data suggest that multisensory processes for common object recognition are active at 4years of age. They facilitate recognition of common objects, and, although not fully mature, are significant in adaptive behavior from the first years of age. The study of typical development of visuo-haptic processes in childhood is a starting point for future studies regarding object recognition in impaired populations.