Motor impairments following brain damage are well documented.

In particular, hemiparesis is a common feature of stroke patients. However, the navigational abilities (here, the ability to plan a path towards a distant target with vision or blindfolded) of such severely disabled patients have been poorly investigated.

Here, we report that hemiparetic patients with significant lesions of the sensory-motor system following focal brain damage are not impaired during spatially-oriented locomotion performed with vision or blindfolded.

This suggests that the motor cortex is involved in the sensorimotor implementation of locomotion but is not involved in the path planning stage in humans.

Such findings open new avenues for post-stroke rehabilitation where specific tests (i.e., adapted versions of our paradigm) may allow parallel assessment of cognitive and locomotor functions recovery after stroke.