Ipsilateral neglect for non-verbal stimuli following left brain damage.

Unilateral spatial neglect (USN) is usually defined as the failure of unilateral brain damaged patients to attend or respond to stimuli in the hemispace contralateral to the site of lesion. This definition encompasses either a complete lateralisation of omissions or their asymmetric distribution in space, whereby only a few are committed ipsilaterally (Gainotti et al., 1990). A few exceptions to this rule have been reported. Rightbrain damaged patients showing right USN in drawing, line bisection and cancellation tasks have been described (e.g., Robertson et al., 1994). Similarly, cases of patients with left brain damage presenting with left neglect dyslexia, but no other signs of left neglect, have been reported (e.g., Patterson andWilson, 1990; Haywood and Coltheart, 2001).We report on the novel observation of a left-brain damaged patient showing left USN in non-verbal tasks. P36, a 42-year-old skilled workman, right-handed, with 8 years of formal education, after having suffered from hypertension for years, had an ischaemic stroke in the territory of the left middle cerebral artery encroaching upon the temporal and the parietal lobes, the posterior aspect of the frontal lobe, the insula and part of the Putamen (see Fig. 1). No other hypodensity or abnormality was noted on a series of CT and MRI scans. At the time of testing, 40 days post onset he still suffered from severe right-sided paresis both in the upper and lower limb, while no neurological signs were detected on the left side. He was not aware of his motor deficits, as evinced by his performance on the VATA-M (Della Sala et al., 2009), suggesting a moderate anosognosia (score 13/36, zero best score,