[An experimental study of autotopagnosia (author's transl)]

One hundred and twenty patients with unilateral cerebral hemisphere damage (54 aphasics, 21 non-aphasic left and 45 right brain-damaged patients and 57 control subjects without cerebral lesions were given a battery of verbal and non-verbal tests of autotopagnosia, with the aim of studying the relationships between disorders of body schema and the side of the hemispheric lesion. A second aspect of our research consisted in understanding whether impairment in naming and pointing to body parts following verbal commands was really a specific symptom or if the same difficulty was found when patients were asked to name or to point to parts of objects other than the human body. Our results have shown that: 1) the aphasic patients are significantly more impaired than the non-aphasic patients on all the tests, non-verbal as well as verbal; 2) when results obtained on tests of naming and of pointing to parts of the human body were matched with results obtained on tests of naming and of pointing to parts of objects other than the human body, no difference could be demonstrated. These findings suggest that autotopagnosia is a nonspecific symptom, and that it does not find a satisfactory explanation in terms of "disorders of the body schema".