Leftward movement in severe neglect

nThe difficulty that patients with unilateral spatial neglect (USN) have in exploring into the contralesional space may be explained by motor or atten tional disorder, We experienced a patient with severe USN following cerebra l infarction in the right postrolandic region, who showed a strong resistan ce to leftward movement. We devised two sets of tasks using a whiteboard. I n the first experiment, the patient showed great difficulty in tracing a li ne from the right endpoint to the left endpoint, The examiner barely made h im start further tracing even by pushing the hand leftward, By contrast, he quickly erased a whole line leftward with an eraser pen, In the second exp eriment, he was required to erase a line with or without an attention-attra cting stimulus at the right endpoint, Not only the leftward extent, but als o the velocity of erasing, were decreased when there was a stimulus at the right endpoint, The results of the two experiments suggest that the ability of leftward movement itself was preserved and overattention to the right-s ided stimuli impaired his leftward movement, We consider that use of the li ne-tracing and line-erasing tasks may contribute to a better understanding of interaction of attentional and motor factors in severe USN.