Asymmetries of Visuospatial Attention in Schizophrenia

Asymmetries of visuospatial attention has long been described in hemispatial neglect, a neurological syndrome in which brain damaged patients fail to acknowledge or explore stimuli presented to the contralesional side of space. Asymmetries for spatial attention were also investigated in schizophrenia. In this review, we report the researches that, using tasks selectively employed to study visuospatial processing in neglect patients, demonstrated hemineglect-like behaviour in schizophrenia. Intriguingly, these studies produced mixed evidence. Some researches found biases towards the left hemispace suggesting a right hemineglect, others towards the right hemispace suggesting a left hemineglect. We examine the possible factors that may have contributed in producing these conflicting findings.