stroke

Blini et al. and Cinetto et al. report
innovative methods for the diagnosis and
rehabilitation of (subtle) spatial biases

Cognitive impairment after stroke is heterogeneous: there is no strict correspondence between brain damage and magnitude of deficit or recovery. Protective factors such as cognitive or brain reserve have been invoked to explain the mismatch.

Susceptibility to multitasking in chronic stroke is associated to damage of the multiple demand system and leads to lateralized visuospatial deficits. A new paper discussing multitasking as a tool to unveil subtle deficits after stroke. We argue that attentional load provides a simple strategy, firmly grounded in theory, to study the gray area in which stroke can or cannot result in stark deficits. This is an opportunity to better frame the mismatch between the amount of brain damage and its consequences, in an era in which this line is becoming increasingly blurred.

Recent studies have shown that brain lesions following stroke can be probabilistically mapped onto disconnections of white matter tracts, and that the resulting “disconnectome” is predictive of the patient’s behavioral deficits.

Unilateral brain damage following stroke frequently hampers the processing of contralesional space. Whether and how it also affects the processing of stimuli appearing on the same side of the lesion is still poorly understood.

Unilateral Spatial Neglect, the most dramatic manifestation of contralesional space unawareness, is a highly heterogeneous syndrome. The presence of neglect is related to core spatially lateralized deficits, but its severity is also modulated by several domain-general factors (such as alertness or sustained attention) and by task demands.