Neglect and spatial attention

Abstract

Do we now understand neglect? The direct answer to this question is clearly no. There are, however, many reasons why one might wish to examine the neglect syndrome. My work did not set out to study neglect in order to explain the syndrome. Instead, I hoped to take advantage of the finding that neglect was most often the result of lesions of the posterior parietal lobe. My goal was to ask if the cognitive operations measured in normal people by mental chronometry (Posner, 1980) reflect the computations in underlying neural systems. I sought to use the “neglect syndrome” to study this issue because at that time the lesion method seemed the only way to connect the observations of neuroscientists (Wurtz, Goldberg, & Robinson, 1980) that cells in the posterior parietal lobe of monkeys were involved in selective attention, with the studies of spatial selection in normal humans. Our findings are well summarised (Posner, 1988) and I believe, even if not everyone agrees, that we did successfully show that parietal lesions impaired specific aspects of the operation of spatial selection (see Farah, 1994, for a current debate on this issue).