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Brain, Vol. 122, No. 1, 131-140, January 1999
© 1999 Oxford University Press

Unilateral neglect and disambiguation of the Necker cube

Edoardo Bisiach1, Raffaella Ricci1, Elena Lai1, Antonio De Tanti2 and Maria Grazia Inzaghi2

1 Dipartimento di Psicologia, Università di Torino and 2 Divisione di Medicina Riabilitativa Ospedale Valduce, Lecco, Italy

Correspondence to: Professor E. Bisiach, 22070 Lurago Marinone, Italy

Three groups of patients (right brain-damaged patients with or without left neglect, and left brain-damaged patients) and a group of healthy subjects, matched for age and educational level to the three groups of patients, were asked to report which of the two frontal surfaces of Necker cubes oriented in four different ways looked, at first sight, nearer to the viewer. The extent to which, and the way in which, disambiguation of the apparent perspective of Necker cubes occurred was found to vary across the four orientations and to be different in left-neglect patients compared with subjects of the other three groups. With normal subjects, the disambiguating factor is suggested to be a disposition to perceive the upper surface, which is nearly orthogonal to the frontal plane, as external to the cube. This would result from a navigation of the observer's spatial attention towards its target along a particular path that is altered in patients suffering from left neglect. It is suggested that comparison of the paths followed by the attentional vectors of normal subjects and left-neglect patients is potentially fruitful for a better understanding of the brain's normal mechanisms of spatial attention and of unresolved issues concerning the perception of the Necker cube.

unilateral neglect; Necker cube; spatial attention

C = control subjects; L = left brain-damaged patients; LANDMARK-M = manual version of the Landmark task; LANDMARK-V = verbal version of the Landmark task; R+ = right brain-damaged patients with left neglect; R- = right brain-damaged patients without neglect


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