Brain Advance Access originally published online on December 14, 2007
Brain 2008 131(5):e94; doi:10.1093/brain/awm273
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© The Author (2007). Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Guarantors of Brain. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org
No reversal of the Oppel–Kundt illusion with short stimuli: confutation of the space anisometry interpretation of neglect and cross-over in line bisection
1Fondazione Santa Lucia IRCCS, Roma, 2Dipartimento di Psicologia, Università degli Studi di Roma "La Sapienza", 3Dipartimento di Scienze Neurologiche – V a Cattedra Università degli Studi di Roma "La Sapienza", Italy and 4Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, University College London, London, UK
Correspondence to: Prof. Fabrizio Doricchi, Centro Ricerche di Neuropsicologia, Fondazione Santa Lucia - IRCCS, Via Ardeatina 306 - 00179 Roma - Italy. E-mail: fabrizio.doricchi@uniroma1.it
Key Words: spatial neglect; line bisection; crossover; space anisometry; Oppel-Kundt illusion
Received October 5, 2007. Accepted October 24, 2007.
| The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below. |
Right-brain damaged patients suffering neglect for the left side of space bisect long horizontal lines to the right of the true centre. This phenomenon is traditionally explained by pathological reduction of the attentional salience of the contralesional side of the line and enhancement of the attentional salience of its ipsilesional side due to brain damage (Pouget and Driver, 2000
; Bartolomeo and Chokron, 2002
). At variance with this largely accepted explanation, Bisiach and co-workers (Bisiach et al., 1994
; Bisiach, 1997
; Bisiach et al., 2002
) conjectured that in neglect patients the representation of horizontal space is continuously and progressively relaxed toward the left and compressed toward the right, in a logarithmic manner. By consequence the left side of a symmetrical horizontal line immersed in this anisometrical representational gradient will be perceived as being shorter than its physically equivalent right side, causing rightward shift of the