ABSTRACT
In 1978, Edoardo Bisiach and Claudio Luzzatti published a brief note in Cortex. They described two patients (IG and NV) with right hemisphere lesions who showed left neglect of imagined scenes or, more precisely, of real scenes but conjured up from memory. This deficit was in addition to the patients’ expected neglect of the left side of visually presented arrays. The idea that half a visual array could be ignored is bizarre enough. That half a subjective image could be neglected almost defies reason itself. In a short time, this little note became justly famous, and has subsequently provoked a huge experimental literature on (to quote the title of Bisiach and Luzzatti’s paper), ‘unilateral neglect of representational space’. It seems to be widely believed that Bisiach and Luzzatti (1978) were the first students to describe imaginal (or ‘representational’) neglect, an impression that is not dispelled by the fact that their paper’s only reference is Karl Pribram’s 1971 book on Languages of the Brain.
