Neglect is characterised by the lack of ability to observe, report and react to sensory cues on one side of space, contralateral to the side of the lesion in the persons brain (Parton, Malhotra & Husain, 2004). Peggy is an example of a patient with Neglect. She is in her late seventies and her neglect was caused when she suffered a stroke, resulting in damage to the right hemisphere of her brain. Peggy’s entire left side of her visual field has disappeared, and she does not attend to any cues on her left-hand side (Ramachandran & Blakeslee, 2005). When asked to perform a copying task from the behavioural inattention test, she tended to omit the left-sided elements of each object.
Cognitive explanations for neglect include spatial attention and spatial representation. Spatial attention is the process where objects in one location are chosen over other objects in another location to be processed (Corbetta & Shulman, 2013). This explanation sees neglect as a disorder of attention and orientation caused by damage to the visual cortex. Neglect patients, like Peggy, will pay attention to the ipsilesional side and disregard stimuli in the contralesional side, in spite of having preserved visual fields (Kwon, Ahn, Kim & Heilman, 2011). All of this results in
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However, while it explains why the neglect is occurring, it does not show what cognition is involved in patients with neglect.
In summary, explanations presented in this account offer some understanding of what is occurring inside the brains of patients with neglect. Both the biological and cognitive explanations have clear strengths and are complimented by each other. In conclusion, this account aimed to present explanations of Peggy’s case of neglect and it can be said that the explanations were successful in fulfilling this