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Seeing where your hands are

Nature volume 388, page 730 (1997)Cite this article

Abstract

Some patients with brain damage fail to identify a sensory stimulus presented on the opposite side to their lesion (contralesional) when a competing stimulus is presented on the same side (ipsilesional)1. This phenomenon has become known as extinction. It is commonly studied using a single sense such as sight or touch (unimodal extinction)2. We have studied a 75-year-old right-handed man (patient GS) who has severe left tactile extinction resulting from damage to the right frontotemporal cortex caused by a stroke. We found that an ipsilesional visual stimulus could induce extinction of a contralesional tactile stimulus (cross-modal extinction). We also found that the visual stimulus operates in a reference system attached to the hand, and not in egocentric coordinates (that is retinal, head or trunk-centred coordinates).

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Psychology, University of Bologna, Viale Berti Pichat 5, 40127, Bologna, Italy

    Giuseppe di Pellegrino & Elisabetta Làdavas

  2. Ospedale I.N.R.C.A. ‘Fraticini’, Via Massoni 21, 50100, Firenze, Italy

    Alessandro Farné

Authors
  1. Giuseppe di Pellegrino
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  2. Elisabetta Làdavas
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  3. Alessandro Farné
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di Pellegrino, G., Làdavas, E. & Farné, A. Seeing where your hands are. Nature 388, 730 (1997). https://doi.org/10.1038/41921

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