Monocular patching affects inattention but not perseveration in spatial neglect.

ABSTRACT

Monocular patching might improve perceptual-attentional, not motor-intentional deficits in a patient with chronic post-stroke left spatial neglect. Performing a line-cancellation task, his omission errors were associated with a perceptual-attentional 'where' deficit, while perseverative errors were associated with 'aiming' motor-intentional bias. Contralesional patching had no effect on the omissions (p = .871), whereas ipsilesional patching reduced left-sided omissions compared with the unpatched condition (p = .016). Neither patching condition altered perseverative errors. Further research is needed to examine whether targeting treatments to spatial neglect symptoms (omissions, perseveration) results in improved outcomes.