Comparison of Parietal and Frontal Lobe Spatial Deficits in Man: Extrapersonal vs Personal (Egocentric) Space

Abstract

Patients with left-frontal, right-parietal, and right or left temporal-lobe damage were tested on two spatial tasks that involved either personal or extrapersonal spatial rotations. The results indicated a lesion-space dichotomy: the left-frontal patients were the most impaired group on the personal spatial task while the right-parietals were the most impaired on the extrapersonal spatial test. The temporal-lobe patients had little, if any, difficulty with either task. These data support the hypothesis that the frontal and parietal regions mediate qualitatively different spatial capacities.