Imaginal neglect as a disorder of mental scene construction

Imaginal (representational) neglect-typically revealed by contralesional omissions when patients describe familiar places from long-term memory-provides a test case for theories of mental scene construction. Unlike propositional recall of place-related facts, imaginal tasks require that semantic knowledge be "spatialized" into a viewpoint-dependent scene that can be actively sampled. We review converging evidence from classic behavioral dissociations (viewpoint inversion; preserved semantic knowledge with impaired spatialized retrieval), oculomotor measures during imagery, sensory interventions (caloric vestibular stimulation; prismatic adaptation), and lesion/disconnection findings. Reconsidering the long-standing opposition between a primary "representational scotoma" and a pure attentional/exploratory bias, we argue that this dichotomy may not correspond to how scenes are actually built: construction and exploration are tightly coupled processes, partly implemented through attentional/oculomotor control. Building on convergent lesion, meta-analytic and neuroimaging evidence that a left-lateralized image-generation system (including the Fusiform Imagery Node) supports the generation of visual content, we propose as a working hypothesis that balanced, viewpoint-dependent spatial organization depends on right-hemisphere attentional control and inter-hemispheric integration, plausibly involving posterior callosal pathways. We specify construction and exploration as sets of operations, relate the framework to accounts of conscious access, and set out empirical tests of its network-level claims.