Reply to: Using SPM normalization for lesion analysis in spatial neglect

Abstract

We are very interested in the letter from Karnath and colleagues and welcome the opportunity to continue this stimulating debate about the anatomy of neglect. Although the arguments advanced by Karnath and his colleagues are interesting, we disagree with them. We hope they will reconsider their interpretation of our findings (Mort et al ., 2003), as well as those of Binder et al . (1992), in the light of our responses. In addition, we draw attention to the fact that the limited new data provided in their letter does not actually support well the controversial claim that neglect is associated with superior temporal gyrus (STG) damage (Karnath et al ., 2001). Karnath and colleagues state that ‘about one‐third of the sample studied by Mort et al . (2003) was normal or close to normal in cancellation’. To be precise, this was four out of 14 patients (M5, M7, M12 and M14) with infarction in the territory of the right middle cerebral artery (MCA) who manifested neglect. Contrary to what is implied, these patients were not included merely because of their rightward bias on line bisection but because they showed neglect in their clinical assessment, including observation of their daily behaviour. In addition, two of them (M5 and M7) showed robust neglect on cancellation tasks when they …