ABSTRACT
Visual neglect denotes diminished awareness of space opposite to a damaged hemisphere. It has sometimes been referred to as hemineglect, spatial neglect, imperception, hemi-inattention, unilateral spatial agnosia, or visual spatial agnosia. Recent work has attempted to quantify observations with more precise measures to develop taxonomies of visual neglect (Gianutsos & Matheson, 1987), and to search for the causes and correlates of neglect. Thus visual neglect has been attributed to derivatives of impairment of defective visual processes (Battersby, Bender, Pollack, & Kahn, 1956; Gianutsos & Matheson, 1987) and attentional disturbances (Heilman, 1985). Historically, there have been attempts to relate visual neglect to motivational aspects of denial (Weinstein & Kahn, 1955). Application of cognitive science to clinical problems (McGlynn & Schachter, 1989) adds a new dimension to help understand visual neglect. In earlier work we found visual neglect was not a simple absence or deficiency in a skill, but consisted of several subsets of deficits involving motor impersistence, visual field cut, extinction, impulse control (Diller & Weinberg, 1977) and sluggish eye movements (Johnston, 1984). In addition, neglect is manifested in free-field search rather than being confined to delimited test conditions (Halligan, Marshall, & Wade, 1990).
