Contrapositioning in a case of visual neglect

Abstract

We describe a series of drawing/copying impairments in a patient with left neglect consequent upon right hemisphere damage. The patient bisects lines significantly to the right of true centre and omits stimuli located on the contralesional side of cancellation tasks. Some of her copies, however, also contain errors whereby elements from left space are transposed to positions in right-sided space. Providing the patient with verbally encoded spatial information appears to facilitate this process. The phenomenon is interpreted against a background of earlier studies of visual allesthesia and current theories of propositional and analogical representation.