Effects of visible and invisible cueing on line bisection and Landmark performance in hemispatial neglect

A total of 12 patients with hemispatial neglect (and two control groups) were tested to examine the effects of lateralized cues on line bisection and Landmark judgements. The experiment was designed to investigate whether bisection and landmark biases induced by cueing are simply a result of a direct perceptual lengthening of the cued part of the line caused by the fact that the cue is visible, thus creating a composite 'line plus cue' or whether cueing indeed induces an attentional bias. Secondly, earlier work by Harvey et al. [Harvey M, Milner AD, Roberts RC. An investigation of hemispatial neglect using the landmark task, Brain and Cognition 1995; 27: 59-78] has shown that in neglect patients cues work by inducing orientational biases rather than via the alteration of subjective length perception. An attempt was made to replicate this finding and extend it to cues that are not physically present. The bisection data clearly showed that cues bias attention rather than work via a direct lengthening of the line: both visible and invisible cues biased bisection performance equally well. The Landmark data, however, revealed much less clear-cut results and we failed to repeat the earlier observation by Harvey et al. that cues induce orientational biases. Even when the neglect patients were categorised into premotor and perceptual categories a clear effect failed to emerge. It is hypothesised that the earlier reported effect may be linked to neglect severity rather than to perceptual type neglect.