Personal neglect-a disorder of body representation?

Baas, Ulrike; de Haan, Bianca; Grässli, Tanja; Karnath, Hans-Otto; Mueri, René; Perrig, Walter J.; Wurtz, Pascal; Gutbrod, Klemens (2011). Personal neglect-a disorder of body representation? Neuropsychologia, 49(5), pp. 898-905. Oxford: Elsevier 10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2011.01.043

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The cognitive mechanisms underlying personal neglect are not well known. One theory postulates that personal neglect is due to a disorder of contralesional body representation. In the present study, we have investigated whether personal neglect is best explained by impairments in the representation of the contralesional side of the body, in particular, or a dysfunction of the mental representation of the contralesional space in general. For this, 22 patients with right hemisphere cerebral lesions (7 with personal neglect, 15 without personal neglect) and 13 healthy controls have been studied using two experimental tasks measuring representation of the body and extrapersonal space. In the tasks, photographs of left and right hands as well as left and right rear-view mirrors presented from the front and the back had to be judged as left or right. Our results show that patients with personal neglect made more errors when asked to judge stimuli of left hands and left rear-view mirrors than either patients without personal neglect or healthy controls. Furthermore, regression analyses indicated that errors in interpreting left hands were the best predictor of personal neglect, while other variables such as extrapersonal neglect, somatosensory or motor impairments, or deficits in left extrapersonal space representation had no predictive value of personal neglect. These findings suggest that deficient body representation is the major mechanism underlying personal neglect.

Item Type:

Journal Article (Original Article)

Division/Institute:

04 Faculty of Medicine > Department of Head Organs and Neurology (DKNS) > Clinic of Neurology
07 Faculty of Human Sciences > Institute of Psychology > Psychological and Behavioral Health

UniBE Contributor:

Baas, Ulrike Monika, Müri, René Martin, Perrig, Walter, Gutbrod, Klemens

ISSN:

0028-3932

Publisher:

Elsevier

Language:

English

Submitter:

Factscience Import

Date Deposited:

04 Oct 2013 14:14

Last Modified:

05 Dec 2022 14:02

Publisher DOI:

10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2011.01.043

PubMed ID:

21303677

Web of Science ID:

000290649200015

URI:

https://boris.unibe.ch/id/eprint/3333 (FactScience: 206991)

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