A rehabilitation study of hemispatial neglect

Abstract

The study concerned rehabilitation of spatial neglect by manipulation of spatial attention. The treatment was limited to the visual modality but extinction and neglect were tested in both visual and tactile modalities. The results showed a clear-cut improvement of visual neglect. Considering that the treatment was based exclusively on manipulating attention, this constitutes strong evidence in favour of the orienting hypothesis. Overt and covert orienting were equally effective in improving visual extinction and neglect. This is against the view that neglect is mainly due to a bias in the direction of gaze. In contrast, no improvement was observed for those tests that involved the tactile modality. This shows that the mechanisms for shifting attention in the visual and tactile modalities are independent and suggests a modularity view of attention mechanisms.