Visuospatial neglect in action

It is well established that patients with hemispatial neglect present with severe visuospatial impairments, but studies that have investigated visuomotor control directly have revealed diverging results, with some investigations finding impairments mirroring the perceptual difficulties of these patients, while others have shown that such neglect patients perform relatively better in action tasks. In this review we attempt to reconcile these diverging findings, addressing differences in the type of visuomotor tasks studied but also highlighting the diverging neuroanatomy that seems to be driving the differences in performance. We argue that there are different types of actions and that these in turn depend on different cortical networks (Goodale, Westwood, & Milner, 2004; Milner & Goodale, 2006).