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Abstract:
Abstract: Right-hemisphere brain-damage often leads to
"unilateral neglect", in which the patient ignores information
towards the contralesional side of space. The perception of gaze
has been little investigated in such patients despite its
importance in everyday life. Previous work on normals shows that
accurate gaze perception depends on seeing both eyes, rather than
just one (Ehrlich & Field, 1993). Since neglect patients might
be expected to be unaware of the left eye in a seen face, their
gaze perception might be abnormal. We report the performance of a
right-parietal neglect patient in a gaze perception task. Like
normals, the patient showed better performance in judging direct
gaze when presented with two eyes, one in each visual field, than
when presented with just one eye unilaterally. This relatively
preserved processing of the left eye in gaze judgements contrasted
with performance on a control task, involving judgements of the
colour or simply the presence of two eyes versus one eye in
bilateral versus unilateral displays. Although the control tasks
are trivial for normals, they are impaired in neglect patients. We
conclude that processing of gaze direction can be relatively well
preserved in neglect, even when awareness of the left eye is
impaired.
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