Thursday, May 17th, 3:15 PM, room 2.15.

Unilateral spatial neglect is an acquired attentional disorder whereby patients fail to attend, perceive and orient to the contralesional side of space. Generally, the lesion interests the right hemisphere, in particular the parietal one.

Around 40% of patients suffering from Unilateral Spatial Neglect (USN) also show a reading impairment in single word reading (i.e., Neglect Dyslexia, ND) where left sided letters are omitted or substituted. Recently, we proposed a new dual mechanism model (Martelli, Arduino, Daini, 2011): While omissions are related to a visuo-spatial exploratory disorder, which characterizes USN plus an eye movement disorder (Primativo et al., 2013), substitutions are due to a perceptual integration mechanism not related to USN. As a consequence, a specific training for omission-type ND patients would aim at restoring the oculo-motor scanning and should not improve reading in substitution-type ND. We present some studies conducted in our laboratory in the last years, which results confirm a dissociation between the two mechanisms underlying different reading errors in ND patients. Moreover, the large percentage of impaired patients indicates that the oculomotor behaviour requires particular attention during the diagnostic phase in order to program the best rehabilitation strategy.

Lisa Arduino is an associate professor at the Department of Human Sciences at the University LUMSA in Rome, Italy, and an associate researcher at the Institute for Cognitive Sciences and Technology (ISTC), National Research Council (CNR) in Rome. Her research interests range from psycholinguistics to experimental psychology and neuropsychology and in particular it concerns lexical and attentional mechanisms underlying the recognition of words and lexical access. The study of these processes is performed with different population samples (children, adults with and without neurological lesions) and makes use of different tasks and methodologies. She has numerous national and international collaborations, in particular with fellow Members: University of Milan-Bicocca, University of Rome "La Sapienza", University of Bari, University of Amsterdam, Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behavior - Nijmegen, Netherlands, Goldsmiths University of London, University of Tel Aviv. She carries out referral activities for national and international journals and she is affiliated to numerous scientific societies (e.g., Italian Association of Psychology (AIP), European Society for Cognitive Psychology (ESCOP), Cognitive Neuroscience Society (CNS), ICPS (Psychological Society) and Psychonomics.