Acute hemianopic patients do not show a contralesional deviation in the line bisection task

Sirs: the line bisection task is a common clinical bedside tool for the assessment of spatial neglect and homonymous hemianopia (HH) [4]. When asked to bisect a line, neglect patients show an ipsilesional deviation [5, 6]. In contrast, hemianopic patients (> 90 %) displace their midline contralesionally towards the scotoma [1, 3, 4]. Evidence for this “typical hemi- anopic line bisection error” came from hemianopic patients in a chronic stage (> 3 months) of brain damage [3]. It is a matter of debate whether their line bisection error (LBE) is due to non-veridical spa- tial representation or an adaptive attentional shift (“compensatory hyperattention”) [1–3].