| Abstract: | Following hemispherectomy, patients performing dichotic listening tasks have great difficulty reporting items presented to the ear ipsilateral to their intact hemisphere. One possible cause is an attentional imbalance which, when competing inputs are received from both sides of space, restricts the patient's attention to the stimulus contralateral to his remaining hemisphere. If this explanation is true, then a similar ipsilateral ear decrement should occur when a competing visual stimulus is presented in the contralateral field. In the present study, however, hemispherectomy patients easily reported a digit presented to the ear ipsilateral to their intact hemisphere despite the concurrent presentation of a visual digit to their contralateral field. |
