Attention Disorders After Right Brain Damage

Download or read book Attention Disorders After Right Brain Damage written by Paolo Bartolomeo and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2013-12-16 with total page 184 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book provides an overview of attentional impairments in brain-damaged patients from both clinical and neuroscientific perspectives, and aims to offer a comprehensive, succinct treatment of these topics useful to both clinicians and scholars. A main focus of the book concerns left visual neglect, a dramatic but often overlooked consequence of right hemisphere damage, usually of vascular origin, but also resulting from other causes such as neurodegenerative conditions. The study of neglect offers a key to understand the brain’s functioning at the level of large-scale networks, and not only based on discrete anatomical structures. Patients are often unaware of their deficits (anosognosia), and often obstinately deny being hemiplegic. Diagnosis is important because neglect predicts poor functional outcome in stroke. Moreover, effective rehabilitation strategies are available, and there are promising possibilities for pharmacological treatments. Attention Disorders After Right Brain Damage is aimed at clinical neurologists, medics in physical medicine and rehabilitation, clinical psychologists and neuropsychologists. It will also be useful for graduate students and medical students who wish to understand the topic of attention systems and improve their knowledge of the neurocognitive mechanisms of attentional deficits. In addition, clinical researchers in neuropsychology and cognitive neuroscience will find in this book an up to date overview of current research dealing with the attention systems of the human brain.