Modulation of hemispatial neglect by directional and numerical cues in the line bisection task
Section snippets
Participants
Seventeen consecutive patients with right hemisphere lesion participated in the study. Patients were admitted to a rehabilitation centre for the treatment of their neuromotor deficits; patients’ demographic, clinical, and neuropsychological data are reported in Table 1. None had a history of substance abuse or other neurological diseases. All participants gave written informed consent to take part in the study, according to the Declaration of Helsinki. The presence of a single right hemisphere
Results
For each bisected line we calculated the difference (in mm) between judged and true midpoints. Rightward shifts are represented by positive numbers, whereas leftward shifts are represented by negative numbers. Responses were approximated to the nearest mm. We then computed the median bisection error for each participant and condition (i.e., across the 10 trials in each condition). Fig. 2 shows the average bisection error for the two groups of patients (N+ vs. N−). We excluded the results of one
Discussion
Task-irrelevant cues had differential effects in modulating the line bisection performance of right brain damaged patients with left neglect. In contrast, all cues were ineffective with right brain damaged patients without neglect. Specifically, the overall rightward bias of neglect patients was modulated only by gaze cues and by the presence of two identical digits. The results will be now discussed separately for these two cue categories.
The effectiveness of gaze cueing has been related to
Acknowledgements
This study was supported by grants from MIUR (PRIN 2004 to M.Z.) and from the European Commission (Marie Curie Research Training Network “Numeracy and Brain Development” to M.Z.). We are grateful to Massimo Iannilli, Luca Ortolani, Carla Piubelli, Umberto Sansubrino, Ilaria Strumendo, and Marco Ferraro for referring patients under their care and for helpful comments.
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