Time knowledge difficulties following treatment for malignant cerebellar tumors ; Difficultés dans les conceptions temporelles après traitement des tumeurs cérébrales malignes

International audience ; In children treated for malignant cerebellar tumors (MCT), there are only a few studies investigating temporal skills, despite a generally admitted role of the cerebellum in time processing. Children’s Time Knowledge (TK) has been defined as the correct representation and use of familiar time units (Labrell, Mikaeloff, Perdry, & Dellatolas, 2016). The present study compares TK in 38 children treated for MCT (mean age 11.6 years) with 105 typically-developing children (TDC).Performances on all TK subtests were significantly lower in the MCT group. The results also confirmed lower mean IQ in children treated for MCT, related to slow processing speed and low performance on working memory and non-verbal tasks. However, low IQ did not explain theconsiderable difficulties in the acquisition of TK.These results are discussed in the light of the role of the cerebellum in time processing and two different models of temporal processing, the internal clock model (Allman, Teki, Griffiths, & Meck, 2014) and the neural network state model (Karmarkar & Buonomano, 2007).