"Left neglect"

Spatial neglect is a complex neuropsychological disorder, in which patients fail to detect and respond to contralesional stimuli. Recent studies suggest that these symptoms may reflect a combination of different component deficits, associated with different lesion substrates. Thus, damage to right lateral prefrontal and inferior parietal regions produce different degrees of left neglect on cancellation and line bisection tasks, respectively. Here we tested for dissociable behaviors across two tasks designed to assess distinct cognitive processes possibly mediating such components, in 14 patients with right focal lesion in either the frontal or parietal lobe...

Visual neglect is a disabling consequence of right hemisphere damage, whereby patients fail to detect left-sided objects. Its precise mechanisms are debated, but there is some consensus that distinct component deficits may variously associate and interact in different patients. Here we used a touch-screen based procedure to study two putative component deficits of neglect, rightward "magnetic" attraction of attention and impaired spatial working memory, in a group of 47 right brain-damaged patients, of whom 33 had signs of left neglect...

OBJECTIVE: Because of the loss of autonomy in daily-life activities, spatial neglect after stroke is one of the main causes of disability. According to the spatial domains, neglect can be divided into personal (body), peripersonal (reaching) and extrapersonal (far) space. We evaluated the effect of these subtypes of neglect on functional outcome of rehabilitation in stroke patients. METHODS: A total of 1350 stroke patients were consecutively admitted into our neurorehabilitation unit from 2002 to 2016...

Right brain injury causes visual neglect - lost awareness of left space. During prism adaptation therapy, patients adapt to a rightward optical shift by recalibrating right arm movements leftward. This can improve left neglect, but the benefit of a single session is transient (~1 day). Here we show that tonic disinhibition of left motor cortex during prism adaptation enhances consolidation, stabilizing both sensorimotor and cognitive prism after-effects. In three longitudinal patient case series, just 20 min of combined stimulation/adaptation caused persistent cognitive after-effects (neglect improvement) that lasted throughout follow-up (18-46 days)...

The line bisection task is widely used in the study of neglect. Some years ago, McIntosh, Schindler, Birchall, & Milner (2005) proposed a radical reframing of this ubiquitous task. Rather than using the traditional measure of directional bisection error, they quantified the sensitivities of the response to the changing locations of the left and right endpoints of the line, expressing these as 'endpoint weightings'. A novel prediction generated from their analysis was that manipulations increasing attention to the left end of the line should cause an increase in the left endpoint weighting and a corresponding reduction in the right endpoint weighting...

Prism adaptation (PA) has been successfully applied in the rehabilitation of spatial neglect, with significant transfer to classic neglect tests and activities of daily living. However, well-controlled studies were unable to replicate these findings, and recent reports suggest that PA may affect selectively visuo-motor symptoms. Here, a patient with pure left neglect dyslexia was tested before, immediately after, and 24 h after PA. Despite a significant adaptation aftereffect adaptation had no effect omissions, substitutions and letter-based errors...

OBJECTIVES: Recent findings suggest that mental arithmetic involves shifting attention on a mental continuum in which numbers would be ordered from left to right, from small to large numbers, with addition and subtraction causing rightward or leftward shifts, respectively. Neuropsychological data showing that brain-damaged patients with left neglect experience difficulties in solving subtraction but not addition problems support this hypothesis. However, the reverse dissociation is needed to establish the causal role of spatial attention in mental arithmetic...

Recent evidence shows that bipolar galvanic vestibular stimulation (GVS) with the cathode on the left (CL) or right (CR) mastoid ameliorates spatial neglect, extinction and verticality perception transiently and partly permanently. However, no randomised controlled trial evaluated the long-term effects of repetitive GVS in comparison to sham-GVS on exploration and verticality perception. To compare the effects of CL-GVS, CR-GVS and Sham-GVS on spatial exploration and verticality perception in right-hemispheric stroke patients with left neglect we conducted a randomised controlled trial with minimisation...

PURPOSE: Patching for double vision is a common palliative treatment for head-trauma patients with acquired strabismus when prisms are not feasible. METHODS: We review literature on spatial neglect and discuss possible effects of monocular occlusion on spatial attention. RESULTS: Patching the left eye has been shown to worsen spatial judgments in some brain-injured patients with left neglect by inhibiting the right superior colliculus further impairing contralateral leftward orienting (the Sprague Effect)...

Confabulations usually refer to memory distortions, characterized by the production of verbal statements or actions that are inconsistent with the patient's history and present situation. However, behavioral patterns reminiscent of memory confabulations can also occur in patients with right hemisphere damage, in relation to their personal, peripersonal or extrapersonal space. Thus, such patients may be unaware of their left hemiplegia and confabulate about it (anosognosia), deny the ownership of their left limbs (somatoparaphrenia), insult and hit them (misoplegia), or experience a "third", supernumerary left limb...

The initial stages of reading are characterised by parallel and effortless access to letters constituting a word. Neglect dyslexia is an acquired reading disorder characterised by omission or substitution of the initial or the final letters of words. Rarely, the disorder appears in a'pure' form that is, without other signs of spatial neglect. Neglect dyslexia is linked to damage involving the inferior parietal lobe and regions of the temporal lobe, but the precise anatomical basis of the pure form of the disorder is unknown...

Right-brain-damaged patients may show a reading disorder termed neglect dyslexia. Patients with left neglect dyslexia omit letters on the left-hand-side (the beginning, when reading left-to-right) part of the letter string, substitute them with other letters, and add letters to the left of the string. The aim of this study was to investigate the pattern of association, if any, between error types in patients with left neglect dyslexia and recurrent perseveration (a productive visuo-motor deficit characterized by addition of marks) in target cancellation...

Recent work has shown that attentional deficits following stroke can be modulated by motivational stimulation, particularly anticipated monetary reward. Here we examined the effects of anticipated reward on the pathological attentional blink (AB), an index of temporal selective attention, which is prolonged in patients with right hemisphere damage and a history of left neglect. We specifically compared the effects of reward versus feedback-without-reward on the AB in 17 patients. We found that the patients all manifested impaired performance compared to healthy controls and that reward modulated the pathological blink in the patient group, but only in the second experimental session...

Unilateral Spatial Neglect, the most dramatic manifestation of contralesional space unawareness, is a highly heterogeneous syndrome. The presence of neglect is related to core spatially lateralized deficits, but its severity is also modulated by several domain-general factors (such as alertness or sustained attention) and by task demands. We previously showed that a computer-based dual-task paradigm exploiting both lateralized and non-lateralized factors (i.e., attentional load/multitasking) better captures this complex scenario and exacerbates deficits for the contralesional space after right hemisphere damage...

The bisection of lines positioned radially (with the two ends of the line close and far, with respect to the participant's body) has been less investigated than that of lines placed horizontally (with their two ends left and right, with respect to the body's midsagittal plane). In horizontal bisection, patients with left neglect typically show a rightward bias for both lines and words, greater with longer stimuli. As for radial bisection, available data indicate that neurologically unimpaired participants make a distal error, while results from right-brain-damaged patients with left spatial neglect are contradictory...

Unilateral spatial neglect consists of the inability of a patient to respond, orient, and attend to stimuli on the left side of a space following a right-hemisphere lesion. Many rehabilitation approaches have been proposed to reduce neglect. The aim of our study was to compare the effect of visual-scanning training (VST) and prismatic adaptation (PA) on patients with neglect following a right-hemisphere lesion. Twenty patients with left neglect were enrolled in the study. Before and after training, a comprehensive neuropsychological assessment of visuospatial abilities, evaluating personal, peripersonal, and extrapersonal neglect, was performed...

Previous studies have shown that left neglect patients are impaired when they have to orient their attention leftward relative to a standard in numerical comparison tasks. This finding has been accounted for by the idea that numerical magnitudes are represented along a spatial continuum oriented from left to right with small magnitudes on the left and large magnitudes on the right. Similarly, it has been proposed that duration could be represented along a mental time line that shares the properties of the number continuum...

Left neglect is traditionally reported to be much more common and more severe than right neglect. Often this is taken as support for a right hemispheric specialisation of visuo-spatial attention. Here, we explore the incidence and severity of ego-and allocentric neglect in a consecutive acute stroke sample (N=298) and compare left versus right neglect recovery 6 months post stroke (N=121). Patients completed the hearts cancellation task from the Oxford Cognitive Screen on average after 6 days and again 6 months post-stroke...

Acquired spatial dyslexia is a reading disorder frequently occurring after left or right posterior brain lesions. This article describes several types of spatial dyslexia with an attentional approach. After right posterior lesions, patients show left neglect dyslexia with errors on the left side of text, words, and non-words. The deficit is frequently associated with left unilateral spatial neglect. Severe left neglect dyslexia can be detected with unlimited exposure duration of words or non-words. Minor neglect dyslexia is detected with brief presentation of bilateral words, one in the left and one in the right visual field (phenomenon of contralesional extinction)...

The study assessed whether the auditory reference provided by a music scale could improve spatial exploration of a standard musical instrument keyboard in right-brain-damaged patients with left spatial neglect. As performing music scales involves the production of predictable successive pitches, the expectation of the subsequent note may facilitate patients to explore a larger extension of space in the left affected side, during the production of music scales from right to left. Eleven right-brain-damaged stroke patients with left spatial neglect, 12 patients without neglect, and 12 age-matched healthy participants played descending scales on a music keyboard...