Homing in on neglect: a case study of visual search

We report three studies of visual search in a patient with left neglect after a right parietal infarct. Manipulations whereby the patient's attention is explicitly drawn to the spatial extent of the page on which the stimuli for cancellation are displayed have little or no effect on the number of targets cancelled. The results are consistent with a "zoom lens" model of attentional deployment. "Neglect" on search tasks seems to reflect a systematic bias that emerges when global attention is constricted to permit analysis of local features.