Is there a distortion of body projection in extracorporeal space in neglect patients?
Résumé
Neglect patients often present with a rightward shift of the direction straight-ahead of body midline. We investigated whether directions ahead of other body parts were similarly shifted or were differentially affected. Right brain-damaged patients, with and without neglect, and normal subjects had to indicate by manual pointings, the directions straight-ahead of the navel, the nose, the left and right shoulders. In neglect patients, constant errors varied across directions with a decrease in magnitude from left to right, suggesting a compression of body projection in extracorporeal space. Moreover, the projection of the left hemibody was smaller than the right in all subjects, with and without neglect. This unexpected finding is discussed with regard to other spatial asymmetries observed in normal subjects.