Effects of emotional face cueing on line bisection in neglect: a single case study

One patient with left neglect (FM) and four right brain-damaged controls were tested on a line bisection task with pictures of neutral and emotional faces as unilateral cues. We thus manipulated the attentional salience of the cues (higher for emotional and lower for neutral faces) while keeping constant their physical dimensions. Our findings showed that left emotional faces were more effective than left neutral faces in reducing bisection errors only in FM. These data indicate that in the neglected hemispace cues bias attention rather than simply altering the perceptual point of balance of the line in the horizontal plane.