page_title: Allochiria
section_title: Experiences
hierarchical_section_title: Allochiria / Experiences
caption_attribution_description: English: clock test with allochiria
context_page_description: Allochiria is a neurological disorder in which the patient responds to stimuli presented to one side of their body as if the stimuli had been presented at the opposite side. It is associated with spatial transpositions, usually symmetrical, of stimuli from one side of the body to the opposite one. Thus a touch to the left side of the body will be reported as a touch to the right side, which is also known as somatosensory allochiria. If the auditory or visual senses are affected, sounds will be reported as being heard on the opposite side to that on which they occur and objects presented visually will be reported as having been presented on the opposite side. Often patients may express allochiria in their drawing while copying an image. Allochiria often co-occurs with unilateral neglect and, like hemispatial neglect, the disorder arises commonly from damage to the right parietal lobe.
  Allochiria is often confused with alloesthesia, also known as false allochiria. True allochiria is a symptom of dyschiria and unilateral neglect.
context_section_description: There are many cases that patients have shown symptoms of allochiria.  Allochiria in constructional tasks is commonly seen when neglect patients transpose the elements on the left side to the right side but fail to see or fix their mistakes.  Some cases in which patients have shown allochiria is in copying and drawing clocks from memory.   A defect of mental representations may lead the patients to transpose all the elements to the ipsilesional side in drawing tasks.  In these drawing and memory tasks, patients with allochiria have a tendency to place all of the hours to the right half of the clock.  There are different kinds of spatial transpositions that exist in these drawing tasks in patients with allochiria.
  The figure shows an example of allochiria in the clock drawing of a patient with hemispatial neglect. The patient omitted the left side of objects when drawing a clock.  Even though the patient could verbally express that the clock face has a left side, he or she would fail to notice that the drawing was incomplete. This implies that drawing tasks can play an important role in differentiating the specific impairment of the brain lesion, and not just saying that a patient has dementia.
  Here is a case study of a patient that is showing neglect symptoms: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_1RPkp7rdnw
caption: Drawing of a clock by a subject with hemispatial neglect allochiria
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