[Thalamic neglect]

Thalamic lesions can provoke negligence behavior with various, sometimes dissociated manifestations: motor negligence or reduction in use of one half of the body whatever the direction of the gesture or the half-space in which it occurs; extinction phenomena demonstrated without difficulty for visual, somatesthetic and auditory modalities; spatial negligence involving attentional and intentional components, often difficult to distinguish. Negligence of this type is mainly the result of right sided lesions, with several non-exclusive explanations: natural predominance of the left hemisphere, activating role of language with respect to the left hemisphere, capacity of the right hemisphere to be "attentive" to bath half-spaces in contrast to the left hemisphere, attentive to the right half-space only.