Vertical Neglect

One of the major neurobehavioral disorders associated with hemispheric brain damage that often prevents patients from properly interacting with their environment, or their own body, is spatial neglect. Although there are many forms or subtypes of spatial neglect, overall this disorder has been defined as “the failure to report, respond or orient to meaningful or novel stimuli presented in a portion of space (extrapersonal, peripersonal, personal and memory-representational), when this failure cannot be accounted for by either an elemental sensory or motor defect (Heilman and Valenstein 1979).”

The vast majority of studies and reports about spatial neglect have focused on horizontal (e.g., left sided) hemispatial neglect and typically when patients are assessed for neglect by using tests such as line bisection clinicians typically only present horizontal lines. Rapcsak et al. (1988), however, reported a patient with Balint's syndrome caused by bilateral parieto-occipital infarctions,...