Videogame Based Neglect Rehabilitation: A Role for Spatial Remapping and Multisensory Integration?

Pirovano et al., 2012). Enriched environments (Risedal et al., 2002), intense practice (Nudo et al., 2001), the possibility to tailor a rehabilitation session to patient's needs, to tune the degree of difficulty to patient's competences, and to enhance interaction during rehabilitation through an immediate feedback to the patient (Sveistrup, 2004) are the most promising features of VG approaches.It has also been suggested that a scenario including meaningful objects, rather than abstract geometric targets as stimuli, could be more motivating and encouraging for patients engaged in motor recovery programs leading to positive outcomes (Laver et al., 2011b;Sedda et al., 2013;Mainetti et al., 2013).Nowadays, however, a simple view based only on the features of the programs cannot explain results obtained through VG platforms.Possible underlying mechanisms of brain reorganization after rehabilitation in virtual environments are unclear and could be far more complex.Nevertheless, there are several clues that they could ground mainly on two processes: (i) near/far spatial remapping, and (ii) multisensory integration.The role of these processes in recovery may be due to the multi-componential character of neglect syndrome (Milner and McIntosh, 2005;Hillis, 2006), as it may affect various domains, such as perception and mental representation in multiple sensory modalities.Remapping of space (Berti and