Geographic Information has to be Spatialised to be Neglected: A Representational Neglect Case

A patient with unilateral neglect had to evoke mentally the map of France in two different conditions. In the first condition, he was asked to build an iconic representation of the map of France and to list all the towns that he could ‘see’ on this mental image within two minutes. In the second condition, he had to remember and name as many French towns as possible within two minutes, without being instructed to form a mental image. Left representational neglect was observed in the first condition only, i.e., when an iconic representation was required. These findings, which were replicated four months later, suggest a dual mode of coding, retrieval, or both, of geographic information and show that, although topographic, geographic data has to be spatialised to be neglected.