D. Grossi et al., THE SELECTIVE INABILITY TO DRAW HORIZONTAL LINES - A PECULIAR CONSTRUCTIONAL DISORDER, Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery and Psychiatry, 64(6), 1998, pp. 795-798
A patient is described who was affected by degenerative dementia and w
ho developed severe constructional apraxia. She showed a dissociation
between the construction of horizontal lines (impaired) and oblique or
vertical lines (spared) which has never been reported previously. A b
attery of tests disclosed that this phenomenon was consistent across a
range of experimental conditions and that a similar dissociation was
evident in perceptual and representational domains. This peculiar clin
ical finding suggests that mental representations of horizontal and ve
rtical spatial relations in an egocentric coordinate system are functi
onally dissociated.