Spatial cognition: evidence from visual neglect

Recent work on human attention and representational systems has benefited from a growing interplay between research on normal attention and neuropsychological disorders such as visual neglect. Research over the past 30 years has convincingly shown that, far from being a unitary condition, neglect is a protean disorder whose symptoms can selectively affect different sensory modalities, cognitive processes, spatial domains and coordinate systems. These clinical findings, together with those of functional neuro-imaging, have increased knowledge about the anatomical and functional architecture of normal subsystems involved in spatial cognition. We provide a selective overview of how recent investigations of visual neglect are beginning to elucidate the underlying structure of spatial processes and mental representations.