Abnormal eye movement behaviour during text reading in neglect syndrome: a case study

The eye movement behaviour of a patient suffering from a right basal ganglia infarction with a left-sided hemineglect but without any visual field defects was investigated during reading. The eye movements were registered by means of an i.r. light technique (pupil-corneal reflection method). The main findings were abnormal return sweeps. Whereas in normal readers the end of one line of text is linked to the beginning of the new line by a long leftward saccade, the return sweeps of the hemineglect patient stereotypically ended in the middle of the next line. They were followed by sequences of short saccades indicating silent backward reading until a linguistically plausible continuation of sentences from the previous line was found, irrespective of the actual beginning of text. The shortened return sweeps could not be attributed to a general oculomotor disturbance. The spatial border for the occurrence of the patient's abnormal scanning pattern (left half of texts) clearly did not depend on a retinal coordinate frame of reference but rather has to be attributed to a different body-centred reference system.