The perception of peripersonal space in right and left brain damage hemiplegic patients

Angela Bartolo,Yann Coello,Mauraine Carlier,Yves Martin,Sabrina Hassaini

doi:10.3389/fnhum.2014.00003

Abstract

Peripersonal space, as opposed to extrapersonal space, is the space that contains reachable objects and in which multisensory and sensorimotor integration is enhanced. Thus, the perception of peripersonal space requires combining information on the spatial properties of the environment with information on the current capacity to act. In support of this, recent studies have provided converging evidences that perceiving objects in peripersonal space activates a neural network overlapping with that subtending voluntary motor action and motor imagery. Other studies have also underlined the dominant role of the right hemisphere (RH) in motor planning and of the left hemisphere (LH) in on-line motor guiding, respectively. In the present study, we investigated the effect of a right or left hemiplegia in the perception of peripersonal space. 16 hemiplegic patients with brain damage to the left (LH) or right (RH) hemisphere and eight matched healthy controls performed a color discrimination, a motor imagery and a reachability judgment task. Analyses of response times and accuracy revealed no variation among the three groups in the color discrimination task, suggesting the absence of any specific perceptual or decisional deficits in the patient groups. In contrast, the patient groups revealed longer response times in the motor imagery task when performed in reference to the hemiplegic arm (RH and LH) or to the healthy arm (RH). Moreover, RH group showed longer response times in the reachability judgment task, but only for stimuli located at the boundary of peripersonal space, which was furthermore significantly reduced in size. Considered together, these results confirm the crucial role of the motor system in motor imagery task and the perception of peripersonal space. They also revealed that RH damage has a more detrimental effect on reachability estimates, suggesting that motor planning processes contribute specifically to the perception of peripersonal space.

Highlights

Spatial perception in relation to the body and the motor system has been the focus of extensive scientific investigations since the late 19th and early 20th centuries
PARTICIPANTS The twenty-four participants involved in this study comprised eight patients with hemiplegia due to lesions to the left hemisphere (LH), eight patients with hemiplegia due to lesions to the right hemisphere (RH), and eight healthy controls (HC, seven males, mean age: 48.75 years, SD: 15.08 years; mean arm length: 74.44 cm, SD: 5.08 cm)
The aim of the present study was to evaluate the consequence of right or left hemiplegia in a group of patients affected by neurological damage to the left (LH) or RH, on perceived www.frontiersin.org peripersonal space and in relation to motor imagery capabilities

Summary

Introduction

Spatial perception in relation to the body and the motor system has been the focus of extensive scientific investigations since the late 19th and early 20th centuries. This was observed in many different disciplines including philosophy (e.g., Bergson, 1896; Husserl, 1907/1998; Merleau-Ponty, 1945), mathematics (e.g., Poincaré, 1907) and slightly later in ethology and sociology (e.g., Hediger, 1934; Sommer, 1959; Hall, 1966), as well as in psychology and neurosciences (e.g., Brain, 1941; Gibson, 1979). Several studies have shown that people are quite accurate in visually delimiting their peripersonal space when evaluated through reachable estimates (e.g., Carello et al, 1989; Fischer, 2000; Coello and Iwanow, 2006; Gabbard et al, 2006), the latter have been found to be influenced by the environmental context (Coello and Iwanow, 2006), the emotional state (Kennedy et al, 2009), the postural constraints (Rochat and Wraga, 1997; Fischer, 2000; Gabbard et al, 2007), and even the presence of mental or neurological illness (Coello and Delevoye-Turrell, 2007; Delevoye-Turrell et al, 2011)

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