Left in the dark: The neglect of theory

Abstract

It is, unfortunately, all too easy to believe that we understand the “core” pathology that underlies left visuospatial neglect: To wit, there is an imbalance of attentional orienting such that patients (with right brain damage) attend firmly to the rightmost component of any visual display; they then cannot (except with extreme difficulty) disengage their attention from that position and “move” the spotlight of processing resources appropriately leftwards. The probability of detecting and responding to visual elements thus decreases from right-to-left as they fall further and further outside the attentional focus; stimuli are more and more likely to be “neglected”. The problem with this story is not that it is false. Indeed, there is a very considerable body of empirical evidence that (broadly) supports the above position. Yet the real issue, we feel, is how little of the clinical data on neglect is truly explained by this account.