Spatial-temporal anisometries following right parietal damage

Patients with right parietal damage often have a lateralized deficit of spatial attention. In addition to a spatial deficit, such patients have also been reported to have a non-spatial deficit in temporal processing. Here, we tested the hypothesis that these spatial and temporal deficits might be linked if the right temporal-parietal cortex is important in integrating spatial and temporal attention. In AF, a patient with an acute right temporal-parietal stroke, we replicated previous observations showing that he was biased to judge ipsilesional stimuli as occurring before contralesional stimuli. More importantly, for vertically aligned stimuli, AF more accurately judged the temporal order of successive ipsilesional than contralesional stimuli. Furthermore, his contralesional performance improved with stimuli with larger vertical separations. Taken together, these findings provide additional evidence that right temporal-parietal damage produces a processing refractory period for stimuli in contralesional space that extends in both space and time. These findings are in agreement with other studies that suggest that the right temporal-parietal cortex is important in integrating the where and when of stimuli.