Recovery of cognitive function soon after stroke: a study of visual neglect, attention span and verbal recall.

Sixty two consecutive patients admitted to hospital and surviving 6 months were tested regularly over the first 3 months after their stroke to plot recovery in three aspects of cognition: visual neglect, assessed using a cancellation task, attention span assessed using digit span, and verbal recall, tested by counting number of words remembered from a list of 10 words. Normative data were collected for the cancellation test. Fifteen patients showed recovery from visual neglect, 10 improvement in attention span and nine improvement in verbal recall. The difficulties of measuring recovery of cognitive function after stroke are discussed.