Effects of attentional and cognitive variables on unilateral spatial neglect.

Patients with visuospatial neglect when asked to cancel targets partially or totally omit to cancel contralesional stimuli. It has been shown that increasing the attentional demands of the cancellation task aggravates neglect contralesionally. However, some preliminary evidence also suggests that neglect might be worsened by engaging the patient in a demanding, non-spatial, cognitive activity (i.

Are drawing perseverations part of the neglect syndrome?

Unilateral neglect patients typically omit to cancel contralesional targets. Moreover, they can repeatedly cancel ipsilesional stimuli exhibiting what is termed 'perseverative behavior'. Two alternative accounts of this behavior have been proposed.

Seeing fearful body language overcomes attentional deficits in patients with neglect.

Survival depends to some extent on the ability to detect salient signals and prepare an appropriate response even when attention is engaged elsewhere. Fearful body language is a salient signal of imminent danger, easily observable from a distance and indicating to the observer which adaptive action to prepare for. Here we investigated for the first time whether fearful body language modulates the spatial distribution of attention and enhances visual awareness in neurological patients with severe attentional disorders.

Visuomotor links in awareness: evidence from extinction.

In patients with extinction, ipsilesional stimuli may abolish awareness of contralesional stimuli. Explanations of extinction often assume a serial model of processing in which sensory competition and identification precedes the selection of responses. We tested the adequacy of this assumption by examining the effects of response variables on visual awareness in six patients using signal detection analysis.

Unilateral neglect and perceptual parsing: a large-group study.

Array-centred and subarray-centred neglect were disambiguated in a group of 116 patients with left neglect by means of a modified version of the Albert test in which the central column of segments was deleted so as to create two separate sets of targets grouped by proximity. The results indicated that neglect was more frequent in array- than subarray-centred coordinates and that, in a minority of cases, neglect co-occurred in both coordinate-systems. The two types of neglect were functionally but not anatomically dissociated.