Abstract
The role of active tool use in the remapping of space in hemispatial neglect patients has been extensively investigated. To date, however, there is no evidence that observing tool use can play a role in the remapping of space in hemispatial neglect patients. In this study, a patient with a severe hemispatial neglect in near but not far space and twelve healthy controls were asked to bisect near and far lines using a laser pen. The task was performed both before and immediately after sessions in which they merely observed the experimenter bisecting near and far lines with a stick. During the observation session, participants were either holding an identical stick or empty-handed. Results, in both the neglect patient and healthy controls, showed that observing the experimenter bisecting line while holding the same tool, produces a remapping of the far space into the near space. This result was particularly evident in the neglect patient where observing line-bisection task extended the spatial deficit from the near to the far space. Our results provide new empirical support to the idea that the space around us is not mapped in merely metrical terms, rather it seems to be deeply impacted by both action observation and execution.
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Notes
CBS = Catherine Bergego Scale; A total score of 0 is considered to indicate no neglect, a score ranging from 1 to 10 indicates mild behavioral neglect, a score of 11–20 indicates moderate neglect and a score of 21–30 indicates severe neglect.
Since confidence intervals rely heavily on the central limit theorem, their estimation may be problematic when the sample data are not normally distributed and/or contain extreme values. This could be problematic in our case, as patients’ behavior tends to be variable, and because there were only eight observations for each condition. Therefore, to assess the accuracy of the reported confidence intervals, we also performed a bootstrap analysis (bias-corrected and accelerated method, 1,000,000 iterations), which provide a robust estimate of the uncertainty associated with parameter estimates (e.g., Carpenter and Bithell 2000) Bootstrap confidence intervals: when, which, what? A practical guide for medical statisticians. Stat Med 19:1141–1164). The so calculated bias-corrected and accelerated 95 % CIs for each condition were very similar to those reported, suggesting that our estimates were not biased, and led to the same conclusions.
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Acknowledgments
MC and EA were supported by a grant from BIAL foundation (grant agreement 41/12 to MC). VG and CS were supported by the EU grant TESIS. CS was also supported by a grant from the Compagnia San Paolo. FF was supported by a grant from the Fondazione del Monte di Bologna e Ravenna. We are grateful to Steve Butterfill for his conceptual and stylistic suggestions and comments.
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Costantini, M., Frassinetti, F., Maini, M. et al. When a laser pen becomes a stick: remapping of space by tool-use observation in hemispatial neglect. Exp Brain Res 232, 3233–3241 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00221-014-4012-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00221-014-4012-z