Article

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.
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Langue : ANGLAIS