Right Cerebral Dominance in Spatial Attention

Tasks based on visuomotor scanning and tactile exploration were used to quantitate neglect behavior in patients with unilateral brain damage and in normal control subjects. The results confirm previous observations that contralateral neglect is markedly more severe following right-hemisphere injury and that it is independent of the modality of sensory input or motor output. In addition, patients with right-hemisphere injury also showed multimodal neglect for targets in the hemisphere ipsilateral to the brain lesion. The emergence of both contralateral and ipsilateral neglect in these patients strongly supports a model of right-hemispheric dominance for the distribution of attention within the extrapersonal space.