Common and distinct neural mechanisms of visual and tactile extinction: A large scale VBM study in sub-acute stroke

Extinction is diagnosed when patients respond to a single contralesional item but fail to detect this item when an ipsilesional item is present concurrently. Extinction has been studied mainly in the visual modality but it occurs also in other sensory modalities (touch, audition) and hence can be considered a multisensory phenomenon. The functional and neuroanatomical relations between extinction in different modalities are poorly understood. Here, we used voxel-based mophometry (VBM) to examine the neuronal substrates of visual versus tactile extinction in a large group of sub-acute patients (n = 454) with strokes affecting different vascular territories. We found that extinction deficits in tactile and visual modalities were significantly correlated (r = 0.341; p