The effects of visuomotor feedback training on the recovery of hemispatial neglect symptoms: assessment of a 2-week and follow-up intervention.

In patients suffering from left unilateral neglect, their right-biased attention to the phenomenal world can be ameliorated, short-term, by making motor responses to left-right extended objects (rods) that immediately reveal to them that their phenomenal world is in fact skewed. In this study the extent to which more intensive experiences of this type produced enduring and useful improvements in neglect, was assessed by first examining the effect of a 3-day experimenter-administered practice of rod lifting, then by examining the effects of a self-administered practice for a further 2-week period and a further 1 month post-training. Despite the fact that by the time the patients were able to undergo the intervention they had progressed to the chronic neglect stage, significant improvements of the intervention over the control group were found for a third of the tests given after the 3-day practice. Additionally, at the 1-month follow-up the intervention group again showed significantly better results in 46% of the direct neglect tests. As far as we are aware this is the first time that significant long-term improvements have been shown in a rehabilitation approach with neglect patients with a mean time of more than 12 months post-stroke and visuomotor feedback training can thus be seen as a most encouraging paradigm for future attempts.