Staring in the Eye of Auditory Neglect: Comments on ‘Gaze Direction Modulates Auditory Spatial Deficits in Stroke Patients with Neglect’

In the current issue of Cortex, Pavani and colleagues show that directing gaze toward the contralesional hemifield significantly diminishes the auditory deficits associated with unilateral neglect. The authors suggest that this beneficial effect of gaze direction may arise due to the recruitment of crossmodal attentional links between audition and vision. A complementary interpretation of these findings is that directing gaze toward neglected sound sources encourages the recoding of auditory spatial location in a relatively preserved frame of reference, and that it is through this coordinate transformation process that awareness of auditory stimuli may be regained. Rehabilitation strategies aimed at recoding stimuli within relatively preserved reference frames may be a useful step forward in managing unilateral neglect.