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| Laura Piccardi |
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Dip. di Psicologia, Via dei marsi 78 - 00185 Roma
e-mail: laura.piccardi@uniroma1.it |
Poster Presentation: |
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| Personal neglect and body representation. |
| L. Piccardi1*, D. Nico1 and C. Guariglia1,2 | |
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1Dipartimento di Psicologia Universitŕ \"La Sapienza\", Roma
2IRCCS Fondazione Santa Lucia, Roma, Italy
*laura.piccardi@uniroma1.it |
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| Several reports showed that a lesion in the right or the left hemisphere of the brain may interfere with body representation and the existence of a specific system devoted to body knowledge has been postulated (Denes, 1999). Patients with unilateral neglect affecting the somatic space typically fail in using their contralesional limb even if they do not suffer from concomitant motor deficits (Vallar, 1998; Bisiach, 1999). Some author maintains that this disorder is due to a defective allocation of attentional resources towards one hemibody and that body representation is spared in brain damaged patients with personal hemineglect (Kinsbourne, 1995; Semenza, 2001). On the contrary, other reports depict personal neglect as a specific disorder affecting body schema (Guariglia et al., 1992; Coslett, 1998). Here we studied 15 patients with a lesion in the right hemisphere showing symptoms of hemineglect affecting personal but no extra or peri-personal space. Patients have been submitted to a screening battery for heminattentive deficits (Pizzamiglio et al., 1990) and tested also for body schema disorders (Daurat-Hmeljak et al., 1978; Semenza et al., 1985). We then asked patients to reconstruct pictures of a body or of a car presented both in front and in lateral view. Results revealed a selective impairment in body reconstruction while no difficulty emerged with stimuli depicting an object. Moreover errors in reconstructing the body affected the whole figure and not only its contralesional half. For these reasons we suggest that personal neglect is not a disorder attentional in nature concerning only half of the body but a deficit affecting the whole body representation. |
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