A new kind of spatial inattention associated with chronic limb pain?

Pathological limb pain patients show decreased attention to some stimuli on the painful limb and increased attention to others, a paradox that has dogged the field for over a decade. We hypothesized that pathological pain involves a spatial inattention confined to bodily representations. Patients sh...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Reid, E, Wallwork, S, Harvie, D, Chalmers, K, Gallace, A, Spence, C, Moseley, G
Format: Journal article
Language:English
Published: Wiley 2016
Description
Summary:Pathological limb pain patients show decreased attention to some stimuli on the painful limb and increased attention to others, a paradox that has dogged the field for over a decade. We hypothesized that pathological pain involves a spatial inattention confined to bodily representations. Patients showed inattention to the painful side for visual processing of body parts but not letters, tactile processing but not auditory, and body-part bisection tasks but not line bisection tasks. We propose the new term "somatospatial inattention" to describe bodily-specific spatial inattention associated with pathological limb pain.