Proprioceptive feedback performance in patients with focal brain lesions.

Utilization of proprioceptive feedback in a manual tracking task was studied in patients with circumscribed unilateral brain lesions. Patients with posterior right hemisphere disease showed severe impairment in performance as compared to those with lesions in other areas of the brain. Increasing the intensity of proprioceptive feedback facilitated the tracking performance of left hemisphere damaged patients while patients with right hemisphere lesions failed to improve. The results were interpreted as supporting the view that the posterior right hemisphere plays a particularly important role in the utilization of proprioceptive information to maintain the position of body parts in space.