The relationships between disorders of visual perception and unilateral spatial neglect.

Abstract The importance of unilateral spatial neglect in lowering the scores of the right brain-damaged patients on tests of complex visual perception was studied by means of two seperate experiments. In the first study 30 controls, 39 left and 68 right brain-damaged patients were given a test of overlapping figures. In the second experiment 40 controls, 62 left and 75 right hemispheric patients were asked to compare the size of 10 pairs of simple geometrical figures, lying on the left and on the right half of a large card. On the overlapping figures test our data showed that ability to recognize realistic overlapping drawing is significantly more impaired in the group of right hemispheric patients. However, a detailed analysis of the types of failures made by the two hemispheric groups stressed the importance of unilateral spatial neglect in lowering the scores of the right brain-damaged patients. In the second experiment the right hemispheric patients with unilateral spatial neglect showed a tendency to overvalue drawings lying on the right half of the card, where their gaze was mostly fixed. The results of both the experiments support the hypothesis that the impairment of the right brain-damaged patients on tasks of complex visual perception may be due, at least in part, to unilateral spatial neglect.

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