2020 Volume 40 Issue 3 Pages 369-376
The Behavioural Inattention Test (BIT) is a test battery that is used mainly for evaluation of neglect in peripersona (lreaching) space. In some patients, severity and characteristics of unilateral spatial neglect (USN) may appear differently between desktop tests and activities of daily living (Azouvi et al., 2003) . Such discrepancies may be due to differences of the distance from the body to the targets and the visual angle of the objects observed. We introduced a virtual reality (VR) task to simulate activities in the extrapersonal space and to predict neglect errors in that space (neglect beyond reaching space) . The patient was a right-handed woman in her 70s, who showed left USN both on the Catherine Bergego Scale (Japanese edition) and in the far space line cancellation task 4.5 years after the onset of right thalamic hemorrhage. Her total BIT scores were, however, within the normal range (BIT conventional subtest score : 140 points ; BIT behavioural subtest score : 81 points) . Her performance of the VR task was compared with those of eleven elderly healthy subjects (71.2 ± 4.0 years) . The total VR task score was lower in the USN patient than in the elderly healthy group. Furthermore, the USN patient made more errors and had greater mean neck rotation angle (rightward bias) than the elderly healthy subjects. These results suggest that use of VR tasks like ours can contribute to developing a means to predict neglect errors in extrapersonal space.
