Division of Cognitive and Restorative Neurology, Department of Neurology, Inselspital, Bern University Hospital, and University of Bern, CH-3010 Bern, Switzerland.
Division of Neuropsychology, Centre for Neurology, Hertie-Institute for Clinical Brain Research, University of Tuebingen, Germany.
Neuropsychologia. 2011 Apr;49(5):898-905. doi: 10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2011.01.043. Epub 2011 Feb 15.
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.
个人忽视的认知机制尚不清楚。一种理论假设个人忽视是由于对侧身体表示的紊乱引起的。在本研究中，我们研究了个人忽视是否最好用对侧身体表示的损伤来解释，或者一般来说是对侧空间的心理表示的功能障碍。为此，我们研究了 22 名右侧大脑损伤的患者（7 名有个人忽视，15 名无个人忽视）和 13 名健康对照者，使用两种实验任务来测量身体和身体外空间的表示。在任务中，必须从前和后判断来自正面和背面的左手和右手以及左后视镜的照片是左手还是右手。我们的结果表明，当要求患者判断左手和左后视镜的刺激时，有个人忽视的患者比没有个人忽视的患者或健康对照者犯的错误更多。此外，回归分析表明，解释左手的错误是个人忽视的最佳预测指标，而其他变量，如身体外忽视、躯体感觉或运动障碍，或左身体外空间表示的缺陷，对个人忽视没有预测价值。这些发现表明，身体表示的缺陷是个人忽视的主要机制。
