No reversal of the Oppel-Kundt illusion with short stimuli: confutation of the space anisometry interpretation of neglect and 'cross-over' in line bisection.

Right-brain damaged patients suffering neglect for the left side of space bisect long horizontal lines to the right of the true centre. This phenomenon is traditionally explained by pathological reduction of the attentional salience of the contralesional side of the line and enhancement of the attentional salience of its ipsilesional side due to brain damage (Pouget and Driver, 2000; Bartolomeo and Chokron, 2002). Here we show that the space anisometry hypothesis cannot offer a parsimonious account of spatial neglect behaviour. Neglect-related phenomena like the cross-over effect can be better explained by precise and simple neurophysiological and attentional mechanisms outdating the purely metaphorical interpretation of clinical evidence offered by the space anisometry hypothesis