Spatially biased decisions: Towards a dynamic interactive model of visual neglect

Patients with lesions of the right hemisphere often show a dramatic lack of awareness for events occurring on the left side of space, to the point of hitting left-sided obstacles or eating only the food contained in the right part of the dish. This condition is known as visual neglect. The study of neglect is not only important for clinical reasons, as these patients have poor functional outcomes, but it is also crucial to understand how we build a conscious experience of our visual environment. This chapter presents neuroscientific and clinical evidence concerning the brain systems of visual attention, awareness, and their disruption in visual neglect. Finally, steps will be presented toward building a model of attentional dysfunction in neglect based on possible inter- and intra-hemispheric interactions of attentional regions and networks in the brain.