Vocal response times to real and imagined stimuli in spatial neglect: A group study and single-case report

The relationships between spatial neglect for perceptual objects and representational for imagined items are difficult to explore because of several methodological problems, including the dearth of comparable tests for real and imagined scenes. We asked 19 patients with right brain damage and 12 healthy controls to say whether an auditorily presented French geographical location was left or right of Paris, and recorded their vocal response times. Afterwards, participants performed a similar test with visually presented items. Although several patients had asymmetries of performance on the perceptual version of the test, only one patient was more accurate for right-sided than for left-sided imagined stimuli, thus showing evidence for imaginal neglect. However, this patient performed normally on place description and on mental number line bisection, perhaps as a consequence of different strategies he employed for these tasks. Overall, our results confirm previous evidence showing that imaginal neglect is less frequent than, and often occurs in association with, perceptual neglect. Imaginal neglect may result from the contribution of deficits partly distinct from those implicated in perceptual neglect, such as impaired endogenous orienting of attention or deficits of spatial working memory.