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Abstract:
Spatial neglect is usually assessed using cancellation tests
or line bisection. A recent comparison of these tests has revealed
a double dissociation, in which one neglect patient was impaired in
line bisection but not in star cancellation whereas another showed
the reverse deficit. This dissociation has prompted the question
whether neglect is still a meaningful theoretical entity. We tested
35 patients with well-defined spatial neglect using a line
bisection task and four different cancellation tasks and compared
these tasks regarding their accuracy in detecting spatial neglect.
The line bisection test missed 40% of our neglect patients. Far
superior were the letter cancellation and bells tests, each of
which missed only 6% of the cases. A deviation in line bisection is
not fundamentally related to spatial neglect, but may also arise
from other causes, and therefore should be treated with caution in
the clinical diagnosis of neglect. Cancellation tests, such as the
bells test and letter cancellation, are more reliable.
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