I'm still having a hard time understanding the symptoms of hemineglect, mainly because perception and attention has been two peas of a pod for most of my experiences.A Scholarpedia article states that a hemineglect patient is likely to shave just one side of their facial hair (thus having left half of their beard intact).I also know that while hemineglect patients have harder time attending to the side contralateral to the lesion location, external effort to bring attention to the contralateral side can bring attention to the contralateral side temporarily.If that is the case and the patient is still familiar with the concept of body symmetry, then my question is:Why doesn't the patient use their concept of symmetry to force themselves to pay attention to the contralateral side? Is even the concept of bilateral symmetry affected, possibly because any memory of an object brought up from long-term memory also loses the contralateral side?
Why can't hemineglect patients be trained to actively pay attention to their neglected side?
neurobiology;vision;attention;neurology