No neglect- specific deficits in reaching tasks

Rossit, S. et al. (2009) No neglect- specific deficits in reaching tasks. Cerebral Cortex, 19(11), pp. 2616-2624. (doi: 10.1093/cercor/bhp016) (PMID:19282456)

Abstract

It is well established that patients with hemispatial neglect present with severe visuospatial impairments, but studies that have directly investigated visuomotor control have revealed diverging results, with some studies showing that neglect patients perform relatively better on such tasks. The present study compared the visuomotor performance of patients with and without neglect after righthemisphere stroke with those of age-matched controls. Participants were asked to point either directly towards targets or halfway\r\nbetween two stimuli, both with and without visual feedback during movement. Although we did not find any neglect-specific impairment, both patient groups showed increased reaction times to leftward stimuli as well as decreased accuracies for open loop\r\nleftward reaches. We argue that these findings agree with the view that neglect patients code spatial parameters for action veridically.\r\nMoreover, we suggest that lesions in the right hemisphere may cause motor deficits irrespective of the presence of neglect and we\r\nperformed an initial voxel-lesion symptom analysis to assess this.\r\nLesion-symptom analysis revealed that the reported deficits did not result from damage to neglect-associated areas alone, but were\r\nfurther associated with lesions to crucial nodes in the visuomotor control network (the basal ganglia as well as occipito-parietal and\r\nfrontal areas).

• Item Type: Articles
• Status: Published
• Refereed: Yes
• Glasgow Author(s) Enlighten ID: Rossit, Miss Stephanie and Learmonth, Dr Gemma and Muir, Professor Keith and Harvey, Professor Monika and Reeves, Dr Ian
• Authors: Rossit, S., Malhotra, P., Muir, K., Reeves, I., Duncan, G., Livingstone, K., Jackson, H., Hogg, C., Castle, P., Learmonth, G., and Harvey, M.
• College/School: College of Science and Engineering > School of Psychology; College of Medical Veterinary and Life Sciences > School of Medicine, Dentistry & Nursing
• Journal Name: Cerebral Cortex
• ISSN: 1047-3211
• ISSN (Online): 1460-2199
• Published Online: 12 March 2009