Horizontal and vertical neglect dyslexia

Abstract

This case study concerns a 25-year-old right-handed male patient (G.G.) with post-traumatic lesions involving the right temporal and occipital lobe as well as the basal forebrain of the same side. G.G., who had a visual field defect almost limited to the upper left quadrant, showed both left horizontal and lower vertical neglect dyslexia, disproportionately severe when compared with left and lower visuo-spatial neglect. This is the first case report of a patient whose neglect dyslexia for vertical stimuli depended upon stimulus orientation, i.e., errors affected the final letters of top-down words and the initial letters of the bottom-up ones. This implies that neglect dyslexia can affect the internal letter shape map not only along the horizontal, but also along the vertical axis.