Objective: Neuropsychological studies suggest that the ability to compensate for the presence of spatial neglect highly depends on the attentional resources a patient can rely on. The present research aimed to study neglect in situations where attentional resources are limited due to multitasking. Method: We examined two patients more than 3 years after a right-hemispheric stroke. Both had received neuropsychological rehabilitation for left neglect and did not show any impairment in standard tests. We used a dual-task paradigm combining a peripheral target detection task with a central shape recognition task. Peripheral targets could appear in left/right positions but also in lower/upper positions. Results: In patient #1, dual-task condition exacerbated left neglect and extinction. Patient #2 did not show any sign of neglect along the horizontal axis, but omitted half of the lower targets when they were presented simultaneously with upper targets under dual-task condition. This behavior reflects altitudinal extinction as the detection of single targets appearing either in upper or lower position was preserved. Conclusion: The present findings show that dual-tasking is a sensitive tool for the quantitative and qualitative assessment of spatial attention deficits, which are often overlooked by standard methods, especially in chronic stage. (JINS, 2019, 25, 644–653)

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Several spaces around the body have been described, contributing to interactions with objects (peripersonal) or people (interpersonal and personal). The sensorimotor and multisensory properties of action peripersonal space are assumed to be involved in the regulation of social personal and interpersonal spaces, but experimental evidence is tenuous. Hence, the present study investigated the relationship between multisensory integration and action and social spaces. Participants indicated when an approaching social or non-social stimulus was reachable by hand (reachable space), at a comfortable distance to interact with (interpersonal space), or at a distance beginning to cause discomfort (personal space). They also responded to a tactile stimulation delivered on the trunk during the approach of the visual stimulus (multisensory integration space). Results showed that participants were most comfortable with stimuli outside reachable space, and felt uncomfortable with stimuli well inside it. Furthermore, reachable, personal and interpersonal spaces were all positively correlated. Multisensory integration space extended beyond all other spaces and correlated only with personal space when facing a social stimulus. Considered together, these data confirm that action peripersonal space contributes to the regulation of social spaces and that multisensory integration is not specifically constrained by the spaces underlying motor action and social interactions.

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