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Neglect - Disorders of the personal space
Here you can see the flower that a 42-year-old well-trained patient with so-called neglect disorder had drawn. This disorder of attention, which often occurs after a right-brain injury, is clearly noticeable in the everyday life of the injured person but the affected person is not aware of his/her deficit (= anosognosia).
Visuall orientation - Broken selective attention
One of the consequences of the neglect
The most obvious sign of neglect disorder is poor orientation in the space. Thus, the affected person bumps conspicuously often into obstacles on one side of the body (mostly on the left): door frames, table edges, etc. But also his reactions to being approached from the affected side are strikingly diminished.
Remember: This is NOT a disorder of vision, but one of attention.
Disturbance of the ability to adequately judge the fellow human beings.
One of the consequences of the frontal brain injury
Injuries in the frontal brain lead to a series of impairments of the "higher" mental processes such as planning and action initiation, cognitive flexibility, coordination of information and processes, sequencing and goal monitoring, and many others. Researchers have shown that the reactions of the autonomic nervous system in social situations are often missing. As a result, their affective evaluations of their environment and fellow human beings flatten out. (Experimentally it could be shown that the skin resistance did not change during uncommented emotional scenes. This reaction occurred as a rule in healthy adults.)
The figure shows the factor analytic evaluation of a young woman's responses in the SEMDI (semantic differential) task. She was involved in an car accident and was unresponsive at the scene. MRI showed numerous pathological signal changes in the cerebral cortex frontal left (contusion hemorrhage left frontal), EEG : focal pathological findings both frontal sides.
The healthy subjects answer in this task in such a way that one can find by the mean of factor analysis at least 3 factors (so called E-A-P factors: evaluation-activity-potency). As can be seen in the picture, this young woman answered in a way that only one meaningful factor could be found.
The most frequent deficits after TBI
The brain injuries can lead to a number of impairments. Various authors give the following percentages of the disorders.
Deficits in the ability to fill missing information
Frequent impairment in cases of traumatic brain injury or in the degenerative processes
Can you recognize what is in the picture? Are there details of the object you could describe?