The representation of body parts holds a special status in the brain, due to their prototypical shape and the contribution of multisensory (visual and somatosensory-proprioceptive) information. In a previous study (Sposito et al., 2010), we showed that patients with left unilateral spatial neglect exhibit a rightward bias in setting the midpoint of their left forearm, which becomes larger when ...

Recently, research on attention has focused on 3 networks that are linked to separate brain regions, i.e. orienting, alerting, and executive control. The attention network test (ANT) is one of the methods to measure the three attention functions. However, neuropsychological investigations have not examined the anatomical disassociation of different attention networks with the same task. We comp...

Signs of unilateral neglect for events occurring in one hemispace most often result from right hemisphere lesions. Right unilateral neglect after left hemisphere damage is much rarer, and has received less attention. The present study explores the relationships between right unilateral neglect and asymmetries in producing laterally directed arm movements in the horizontal plane in left brain-da...

Over the past several decades a growing amount of research has focused on the possibility of transiently reducing left neglect signs in right brain-damaged patients by using vestibular and/or visuo-proprioceptive stimulations. Here we review seminal papers dealing with these visuo-vestibulo-proprioceptive stimulations in normal controls, right brain-damaged (RBD) patients, and animals. We discu...

Right brain damages can manifest deficits of communicative skills, which sometimes cause an important inability. The communication impairments following a right hemisphere damage are distinct from those in aphasia and may affect discursive, lexico-semantic, pragmatic, and prosodic components of communication. It is calculated that this troubles affect almost a 50% of this patients. However, the...

In narrative discourse, explanation can be considered abductive reasoning, described as a creative type of reasoning which generates new ideas, and prediction can be considered logical deductive reasoning. Given the well-known associations with hemisphere processing and reasoning associations, it would be expected that patients with left hemisphere brain damage would exhibit more evidence of ex...

Early studies reported preserved formulaic language in left hemisphere damaged subjects and reduced incidence of formulaic expressions in the conversational speech of stroke patients with right hemispheric damage. Clinical observations suggest a possible role also of subcortical nuclei. This study examined formulaic language in the spontaneous speech of stroke patients with left, right, or subc...

Recent neuropsychological evidence suggests that acquired brain lesions can, in some instances, abolish the ability to integrate inputs from different sensory modalities, disrupting multisensory perception. We explored the ability to perceive multisensory events, in particular the integrity of audio-visual processing in the temporal domain, in brain-damaged patients with visual field defects (V...

In the past 20 years extensive research on visuoperceptual disorders after focal brain damage has shown that injury to the right cerebral hemisphere is especially detrimental to performance on several tasks involving processing of visual stimuli. Individual findings, however, have so far proved to be scarcely susceptible of a unitary interpretation. Isolated explanatory essays relating interhem...

In the past 20 years extensive research on visuoperceptual disorders after focal brain damage has shown that injury to the right cerebral hemisphere is especially detrimental to performance on several tasks involving processing of visual stimuli. Individual findings, however, have so far proved to be scarcely susceptible of a unitary interpretation. Isolated explanatory essays relating interhem...