Frontiers in Human Neuroscience (Jun 2012)
Limb activation ameliorates body schema deficits in spatial neglect
Abstract
Abstract: Many neglect patients show deficits in the mental representation of theircontralesional body side or body parts, termed personal neglect. These deficits includeimpairments in identifying body parts on schematic drawings of human bodies. Limbactivation and alertness cues have been shown to modulate neglect transiently, and areeffective treatments for several symptoms of the neglect syndrome. Here, we tested on 8patients with right-hemispheric stroke and left-sided spatial neglect whether these twotechniques modulate deficits in the mental representation of hands, assessed with a hand-testin which the subjects had to decide whether a depicted schematic hand belongs to the left orright side of the human body. The results showed that neglect patients made marginallysignificant (p = 0.065) more errors in left-hand-decisions than right-hand-decisions, indicatinga neglect-specific disorder. Moreover, we found that left-sided limb activation but not nonlateralizedalertness cueing (a loud noise immediately before patients made their perceptualdecision) significantly reduced misidentifications for depicted left hands as compared tobaseline. No effect of any intervention was observed on error rates for depicted right hands.We conclude that the amelioration of the performance in the hand task is modulated by theactivation of the body schema or other body representations through left-sided limbactivation.
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