Illusory hand ownership in a patient with personal neglect for the upper limb, but no somatoparaphenia.
The symptoms of patients with left personal neglect are characterized by inattention towards contralesional (left) body parts while at the same time explicitly ascertaining ownership for the neglected hemibody. It is currently unknown if personal neglect is associated with more subtle or implicit disturbances of own body perception and body ownership as measured with the rubber hand illusion. In this study, we report data from a patient with a right hemispheric lesion and personal neglect, without associated somatosensory deficits. We administered to the patient (and to 12 age-matched controls) the rubber hand illusion paradigm to the right and left hands, to elicit illusory ownership for a fake hand, before and after recovery from personal neglect for the left arm. In a first session, run when the patient showed personal neglect affecting the left arm, he experienced a significantly enhanced subjective illusion of embodiment for the left fake hand as compared to the right hand (as assessed through a standard questionnaire). After recovery from personal neglect for the left arm (second session), the results of the left and right rubber hand illusion experiments were comparable, with no modulation of hand ownership. We argue that personal neglect may consist not only in an inattentional disorder, but also in a deficit of multisensory body representation characterized by a high sensitivity to experimental manipulations of subjective aspects of body ownership.