Attention: Neglect Flashcards
What does the term neglect refer to?
Inattention to usually left side of space
- a failure to report, respond or orient to novel or meaningful contranlesional stimuli (the other side of the lesion)
What causes neglect?
usually caused by stroke affecting right parietal lobe
What are the tests most commonly used to assess neglect?
- cancellation tasks
*cancel all the letter A’s
*can be made harder by adding more letters
= A’s crossed off in the right side only - line bisection task
- horizontal lines, asked to bisect it
= bisected lines on the right mostly (since they only see the right side = middle is more to the right) - copying/ drawing tasks
= copying only the right side of the picture
What does neglect tell us about visual processing + attention?
- operates in multiple spatial + object reference frames
- High degree of processing occur in absence of awareness
- Visual imagery is processed similarly to incoming sensory info
What is extinction?
A milder form of neglect only revealed when stimuli “compete” for attention
- eg right side object extinguishes the presences of the left side object
What approach do neuropsycholoy take to study brain?
“reverse engineering” the brain
- infer a cognitive mechanism of the function of a brain region by the system
Give examples of how neuropsychology has been used as a method to better understand the workings of the brain?
- Stroke = unable to recognise fruits, animals or trees but could recognise tools, vehicles = furniture
== living vs non-living objects represented differently in the brain - Damage brain region disrupts reading, but not speaking or seeing
== the region is specialised for some aspect of processing text
What can often be observed for patients suffering from neglect?
- shave/ make-up on one side only
- eat off one side of plate
- read text on one half of page
bump into walls/ ignore people on their left - be unaware of their difficulties “anosognosia”
What does anosognosia mean?
- difficulty for people to be aware of their own disorder/ deficit/ condition
- neglect
Is neglect just a problem with vision/ visual perception?
NO
- if person was blind on one side, they would behave the same but they don’t
- was able to complete cancellation task easy peasy
What is the recovery like for neglect?
- usually recover spontaneously within a few weeks/ months
- Anton Raederscheidt - progressive recovery from his stroke seen in his portraits
What frames of reference does neglect operate on?
- object-centred = left of the object
- correctly identify the intrinsic axis (half way of each object shown)
- NOT egocentric = left of one self
What evidence is there neglect operated on “object-centred” reference of frame?
- pic with 2 flower = half of each flower drawn
- pic with the flower joined together = half of of that only
What is “blind-sight’ in neglect referring to?
- one house with fire on the left and normal one on the right
- when asked if same = same
- when asked which one they would live int = point to the one without fire even tho they can’t see the fire
= suggests unconscious processing can influence action/ decision making
Does neglect affect mental representations?
YES
- asking patient to eg draw clock or flower
= half of flower/ half of number on clock
