title: The eyes have it: Oculomotor exploration and line bisection in neglect.
abstract: In this issue of Cortex, Ishiai et al. (2006) report the eye movements of patients with left neglect during the bisection of lines of different lengths. This is the latest in a series of papers from Ishiai's group, which form an important corpus of data on the oculomotor behaviour of neglect patients during line bisection and related tasks. In this article, I argue that these data should critically constrain theoretical models of bisection errors in neglect, but that these constraints have been applied rarely in practice. First, I briefly introduce bisection behaviour in neglect and describe some of the models proposed to account for its character. I then consider the implications for these models of Ishiai and colleagues' observations. Finally, I outline a novel view of the bisection task that is more compatible with their observations.
authors.affiliation: Human Cognitive Neuroscience Research Group, Psychology Department, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK. r.d.mcintosh@ed.ac.uk
authors.forename: Robert D
authors.initials: RD
authors.lastname: McIntosh
mesh_terms: D000368:Aged; D005133:Eye Movements / Q000502:physiology*; D006801:Humans; D010468:Perceptual Disorders / Q000523:psychology*; D011601:Psychophysics; D014796:Visual Perception / Q000502:physiology*