Every saccade is generally preceded by a mandatory shift of attention to the saccade endpoint, allowing us to process visual information more effectively. Whether this ‘pre-saccadic shift of attention’ is still intact in hemispatial neglect is unknown. Whereas neglect patients exhibit lateralized impairments of attention and often show impaired saccadic behaviour, it is not yet clear how the pre-saccadic shift of attention is affected during accurately executed eye movements. In this study, we used a gaze contingent visual discrimination task, in which neglect patients had to discriminate a probe presented before saccade onset. Results revealed an imbalance in discrimination performance between the two hemifields with poor performance to probes in the contralesional compared to the ipsilesional hemifield when accounting for saccadic impairments. These results suggest that attention and eye movements are both unique impairments of neglect patients. We hypothesize that the impaired pre-saccadic shift of attention could be one of the key problems of neglect and might underlie other spatial and non-spatial deficits often reported in neglect patients.

每次跳视之前，通常都会强制将注意力转移到跳视终点，使我们能够更有效地处理视觉信息。这种“扫视前的注意力转移”是否在半空间忽视中仍然完好无损还不得而知。而忽视患者表现出注意力的偏侧性损伤并且经常表现出受损的扫视行为，目前尚不清楚在准确期间如何影响前扫视转移执行的眼球运动。在这项研究中，我们使用了注视条件视觉辨别任务，其中被忽视的患者必须辨别眼跳开始前出现的探针。结果显示，在考虑扫视障碍时，两个半场之间的辨别性能不平衡，与同侧半场相比，对侧探头的性能较差。这些结果表明注意力和眼球运动都是忽视患者的独特障碍。我们假设受损的前扫视转移注意力可能是忽视的关键问题之一，并且可能是忽视患者经常报告的其他空间和非空间缺陷的基础。