Bisecting Lines with Different Tools in Right Brain Damaged Patients: The Role of Action Programming and Sensory Feedback in Modulating Spatial Remapping

In a first experiment we studied, through a line bisection task, (a) the frequency of the selective disruption of far or near space representations in a group of 28 right brain-damaged patients and (b) the effect of tool use on line bisection error in far and near space in order to clarify whether the kind of action performed by the subject influences the extension of space representation, as suggested by previous studies. In a second experiment, carried out on two neglect patients, we asked whether the representation of “near” and “far” space depends on the sensory feedback during the execution of the action or whether it is independent on sensory feedback and more related to the action programmed as a consequence of the kind of tool used. Our data show (a) that dissociations between far and near space neglect are a frequent observation in right brain damaged patients and that most of these patients are able to recode space representations when tools change the spatial relation between the agent's body and the target object; (b) that spatial remapping can be elicited by the kind of action associated to the tool used and by the sensory feedback (either visual or proprioceptive) available during the execution of the task. In particular, presence of tactile proprioceptive feedback elicited remapping of far space into near space, whereas absence of visual feedback induced remapping of near space into far space.