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ERIC Number: EJ724524
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2005-Dec
Pages: 10
Abstractor: Author
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: ISSN-0278-2626
EISSN: N/A
Poor Hand-Pointing to Sounds in Right Brain-Damaged Patients: Not Just a Problem of Spatial-Hearing
Pavani, Francesco; Farne, Alessandro; Ladavas, Elisabetta
Brain and Cognition, v59 n3 p215-224 Dec 2005
We asked 22 right brain-damaged (RBD) patients and 11 elderly healthy controls to perform hand-pointing movements to free-field unseen sounds, while modulating two non-auditory variables: the initial position of the responding hand (left, centre or right) and the presence or absence of task-irrelevant ambient vision. RBD patients suffering from visual neglect, unlike RBD patients without neglect and healthy controls, showed a systematic rightward error in sound localisation, which was modulated by the non-auditory variables. Localisation errors were exacerbated by initial hand-position to the right of the body-midline, and reduced by the leftwards initial hand-position. Moreover, for the visual neglect patients, mere presence of ambient vision worsened localisation errors. These results demonstrate that although hand-pointing to sounds has often been considered a straightforward approach to investigate sound-localisation abilities in brain-damaged patients, in some patients it may actually reveal localisation deficits that reflect a combination of impaired spatial-hearing and spatial biases from other sensory modalities (i.e., vision and proprioception).
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Publication Type: Journal Articles; Reports - Research
Education Level: N/A
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Sponsor: N/A
Authoring Institution: N/A
Identifiers - Location: Italy
Grant or Contract Numbers: N/A