Come together: human-avatar on-line interactions boost joint-action performance in apraxic patients.

ABSTRACT: Limb apraxia (LA) is a high-order motor disorder linked to left-hemisphere damage. It is characterized by defective execution of purposeful actions upon delayed imitation, or verbal command when the actions are performed in isolated, non-naturalistic, conditions. Whether interpersonal interactions provide social affordances that activate neural resources different from those requested by individual action execution, which may improve LA performance, is unknown. To fill this gap, we measured interaction performance, behavioral and kinematic indexes of left-brain damaged patients with/without LA in a social reach-to-grasp task involving two different degrees of spatio-temporal interactivity with an avatar. We found that LA patients' impairment in coordinating with the virtual partner was abo

SUBMITTER: Candidi M 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5714226 | biostudies-literature | 2017 Nov

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature