This study clearly indicates that trunk performance is still impaired in non-acute and chronic stroke patients. When planning future follow-up studies, use of the Trunk Impairment Scale has the advantage that it has no ceiling effect.

In addition to conventional therapy, truncal exercises have a beneficial effect on truncal function, standing balance, and mobility in people after stroke.

Our results suggest that, in addition to conventional therapy, trunk exercises aimed at improving sitting balance and selective trunk movements have a beneficial effect on the selective performance of lateral flexion of the trunk after stroke.

Right-sided parietal lesions lead to lateralized attentional deficits which are most prominent with bilateral stimulation. We determined how an irrelevant stimulus in the unattended hemifield alters attentional responses in parietal cortex during unilateral orienting. A trial consisted of a central spatial cue, a delay and a test phase during which a grating was presented at 9 degrees eccentricity. Subjects had to discriminate the orientation of the grating. The unattended hemifield was either empty or contained a second, irrelevant grating. We carried out a series of functional MRI (fMRI) studies in 35 healthy volunteers (13 men and 22 women, aged between 19 and 30 years) as well as a behavioural and structural lesion mapping study in 17 right-hemispheric lesion patients, 11 of whom had neglect. In the patients with but not in those without neglect, the addition of a distractor in the unattended hemifield significantly impaired performance if attention was directed contralesionally but not if it was directed ipsilesionally. In the healthy volunteers, we discerned two functionally distinct areas along the posterior-anterior axis of the intraparietal sulcus (IPS). The posterior, descending IPS segment in both hemispheres showed attentional enhancement of responses during contralateral attentional orienting and was unaffected by the presence of an irrelevant stimulus in the ignored hemifield. In contrast, the right-sided horizontal IPS segment showed a strong attentional response when subjects oriented to a stimulus in the relevant hemifield and an irrelevant stimulus was simultaneously present in the ignored hemifield, compared with unilateral stimulation. This effect was independent of the direction of attention. The symmetrical left-sided horizontal IPS segment showed the highest responses under the same circumstances, in combination with a contralateral bias during unilateral stimulation conditions. None of the six patients without neglect had a lesion of the horizontal IPS segment. In four of the 11 neglect patients, the lesion overlapped with the horizontal IPS activity cluster and lay in close proximity to it in another four. The remaining three patients had a lesion at a distance from the parietal cortex. Our findings reconcile the role of the IPS in endogenous attentional control with the clinically significant interaction between direction of attention and bilateral stimulation in right parietal lesion patients. Functional imaging in neglect patients will be necessary to assess IPS function in those cases where the structural lesion spares the middle IPS segment.

A c c e p t e d M a n u s c r i p t A within-subject double dissociation between physical and number-space neglect is described This double dissociation extended to ordinal sequences and was non-spatial in natureThe number-space neglect was associated with a position-based deficit in working memory Pointers towards a new theory for the relation between numbers and space are discussed *Research HighlightsPage 2 of 58 A c c e p t e d M a n u s c r i p t 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 3 Non-Spatial Neglect for the Mental Number LineIn 1880 Galton published two papers in which he described people who report vivid spatial experiences when processing numbers, forming what he called "natural lines of thought" (Galton, 1880a(Galton, , 1880b. This observation supported the intuitive idea that the processing of number and space are tightly linked. It is only in the last two decades, however, that the relation between numbers and space has become the subject of systematic investigation and now, about 100 years after Galton"s classical observation, it is widely accepted that the processing of numbers is intimately related to the processing of spatial information at both functional and anatomical levels (e.g. Dehaene, Piazza, Pinel, & Cohen, 2003;Fias & Fischer, 2005;Hubbard, Piazza, Pinel, & Dehaene, 2005; Umilta, Priftis, & Zorzi, 2007).One of the most convincing and robust phenomena that demonstrate the interaction between numbers and space is the SNARC-effect. When asked to indicate whether a number is odd or even with a left or right key press, participants tend to react faster to relatively small numbers (e.g. 1) with their left hand than with their right hand side, while they are faster to relatively large numbers (e.g. 9) when the responses are executed with the right hand side. Dehaene et al. (1993) called this finding the spatial-numerical association of response codes (SNARC) effect and postulated that it was attributable to the mental organization of numbers, taking the form of a horizontally oriented mental number line (MNL) with small numbers located on the left and large numbers on the right. Since then, this effect has been replicated in a wide variety of experimental tasks, for example, magnitude comparison (Brysbaert, 1995) or phoneme monitoring (Fias, Brysbaert, Geypens, & d'Ydewalle, 1996), for a re...

It is generally accepted that the mental representation of numerical magnitude consists of a spatial “mental number line” (MNL) with smaller quantities on the left and larger quantities on the right. However, the amount of dissociations between tasks that were believed to tap onto this representational medium is accumulating, questioning the universality of this model. The aim of the present study was to unravel the functional relationship between the different tasks and effects that are typically used as evidence for the MNL. For this purpose, a group of right brain damaged patients (with and without neglect) and healthy controls were subjected to physical line bisection, number interval bisection, parity judgment, and magnitude comparison. Using principal component analysis, different orthogonal components were extracted. We discuss how this component structure captures the dissociations reported in the literature and how it can be considered as a first step toward a new unitary framework for understanding the relation between numbers and space.

Neuropsychological diagnostic tests of visual perception mostly assess high-level processes like object recognition. Object recognition, however, relies on distinct mid-level processes of perceptual organization that are only implicitly tested in classical tests. The Leuven Perceptual Organization Screening Test (L-POST) fills a gap with respect to clinically oriented tests of mid-level visual function. In 15 online subtests, a range of mid-level processes are covered, such as figure-ground segmentation, local and global processing, and shape perception. We also test the sensitivity to a wide variety of perceptual grouping cues, like common fate, collinearity, proximity, and closure. To reduce cognitive load, a matching-to-sample task is used for all subtests. Our online test can be administered in 20-45 min and is freely available at www.gestaltrevision.be/tests . The online implementation enables us to offer a separate interface for researchers and clinicians to have immediate access to the raw and summary results for each patient and to keep a record of their patient's entire data. Also, each patient's results can be flexibly compared with a range of age-matched norm samples. In conclusion, the L-POST is a valuable screening test for perceptual organization. The test allows clinicians to screen for deficits in visual perception and enables researchers to get a broader overview of mid-level visual processes that are preserved or disrupted in a given patient.

The aim of this study was to investigate, in 114 stroke patients, the frequency of occurrence of a largely unknown neurological disorder, characterized by a postural imbalance due to a 'pushing away' reaction of the body towards the contralesional side of space, in function of hemispheric lesion localization and gender. The study also investigate the relation of this contraversive pushing with active movement, somatosensory perception deficits and, in particular, inattention of contralesional hemispace and body. The similarity of the presence of contraversive pushing and the syndrome of spatial hemineglect together with a gender-related differentiation suggest the existence of a "pusher syndrome", in which the pathophysiology points in the direction of a spatial higher-order processing deficit, related to spatial inattention, underlying the higher frequency and severity of contraversive pushing after right brain lesions.