Prism adaptation in patients with unilateral lesion of the parietal or cerebellar cortex: A pilot study on two single cases using a concurrent exposure procedure

Neuroimaging studies showed that prism adaptation (PA), a widely used tool for the rehabilitation of neglect, involves a wide network of brain regions including the parietal cortex and the cerebellum. In particular, the parietal cortex has been suggested to mediate the initial stage of PA through conscious compensatory mecha-nisms as a reaction to the deviation induced by PA. The cerebellum, on the other side, intervenes in sensory errors prediction to update internal models in later stages. It has been suggested that two mechanisms may underlie PA effects: recalibration, a strategic cognitive process occurring in the initial stages of PA, and realignment, a fully automatic reorganization of spatial maps emerging later and more slowly in time. The pa-rietal lobe has been proposed to be involved mainly in the recalibration whereas the realignment would be carried over by the cerebellum. Previous studies have investigated the effects of a lesion involving either the cerebellum or the parietal lobe in PA taking into account both realignment and recalibration processes. Conversely, no studies have compared the performance of a patient with a cerebellar lesion to that of a patient with a parietal lesion. In the present study, we used a recently developed technique for digital PA to test for differences in visuomotor learning after a single session of PA in a patient with parietal and a patient with cerebellar lesions, respectively. The PA procedure, in this case, includes a digital pointing task based on a concurrent exposure technique, which allows patients to fully see their arm during the pointing task. This procedure has been shown to be as effective as the terminal exposure condition in neglect rehabilitation albeit different processes take place during concurrent exposure condition compared to the most used terminal exposure (allowing to see only the final part of the movement). Patients' performances were compared to that of a control group. A single session of PA was administered to 1) a patient (BC) with left parieto-occipital lesion involving superior parietal lobe (SPL) and inferior parietal lobe (IPL), 2) a patient (TGM) with a stroke in the territory sub-served by the superior cerebellar artery (SCA) , and 3) 14 healthy controls (HC). The task included three conditions: before wearing prismatic goggles (pre-exposure), while wearing prisms (exposure) and after removing the goggles (post-exposure). Mean deviations were calculated for the following phases: pre-exposure, early-exposure, late-exposure, post-exposure. The presence of after-effect was calculated as the difference between pre-exposure and post-exposure conditions. For each of these conditions, patients' per-formance was compared to that of the control group by using a modified Crawford t-test. We found that the patient with the parietal lesion had a significantly different performance in the late-exposure and in the post -exposure compared to both HC and the patient with the cerebellar lesion. Conversely, no differences were observed between TGM and HC across all the conditions.