Unveiling covert disownership after stroke. A neuropsychological and neural approach
Abstract
Self-awareness can be impaired in different forms, including bodily features, following brain lesions. Such as other complex symptoms, these disorders seem not being localized in one brain area but may occur following the impairment of different parts of a network. One of the most disrupting body awareness disorder for people’s functioning is the feeling that one or more body parts do not belong to the person anymore, the so-called “body part disownership”. This symptom can be undetected, with recent findings suggesting that subtle signs of body disownership are revealed using an assessment with a non-verbal response, instead of a verbal interview. In the present study, by exploiting a large clinical dataset and state-of-the art analyses of lesion-induced disconnectivity, we have investigated this newly detected entity, called covert disownership, in the early phase post-stroke.
