The ‘Neglected’ Personal Neglect

A review of patients with brain injury showing personal neglect is presented. The aim is to shed light on this aspect of neglect often unresearched or only indirectly investigated, and to discuss recent findings concerning the methods used to assess personal neglect, its neural correlates and its association with the more often explored aspect of extrapersonal neglect. The review was performed using PubMed and PsychInfo databases to search for papers published in the last 123 years (until January 2018). We reviewed 81 papers describing either single or group studies for a total of 2247 patients. The results of this review showed that various aspects of personal neglect are still controversial and outcomes potentially contradictory. Despite the data reported in the present review suggest that personal neglect is more frequently associated with lesions of the right hemisphere, the left hemisphere may also play an important role. Not surprisingly, personal neglect and extrapersonal neglect seem to co-occur. However double dissociations of these two forms of neglect have been reported, and they seem to dissociate both from a functional and an anatomical perspective. More recent interpretations of personal neglect suggest that it may result from a disrupted body representation. The development of reliable psychometric tools with shared diagnostic criteria is essential to identify different degrees of personal neglect for different body parts and to better refine personal neglect in comparison to extrapersonal neglect and disorders related to distortions of personal domain.