Are drawing perseverations part of the neglect syndrome?

Disentangling the Neuroanatomical Correlates of Perseveration from Unilateral Spatial Neglect

“…Other strengths of this dataset are a relatively large number of patients, with both diffusion and perfusion scans, dysfunctional tissue analysis, and assessment of both perseveration and neglect. Many recent studies have been performed in the chronic phase [4,16,19,20,23,24] or subacute phase [6,14,17] after some patients may have recovered from perseverative behavior, making it difficult to ascertain whether or not the patients' lesions were critical for the early appearance of perseveration. When studying in the acute or early subacute phase, both diffusion and perfusion must be used to account for all dysfunctional tissue that might account for the abnormal behavior.…”

“…The strongest correlations were found for neglect, therefore when comparing P+N+ to P+N-we see the locations that are more associated with neglect than perseveration. These BA are: 4,6,18,19,37,44,45,46, and the anterior insula. The converse contrast (P+N+ compared to P-N+) did not reveal areas significantly more associated with perseveration than neglect because only three patients had P-N+.…”

“…Researchers have studied perseverations defined as "re-markings" or crossing out stimuli many times [6,14,15,17,19,20]. These "re-markings" have been defined as "simple" often re-cancelling of previous targets, or "complex" such as elaborate drawings [6,15,21].…”

“…Perseveration can occur in patients without neglect on paper and pencil tasks [17,20], although it may still be caused by spatial bias [6]. The severity of neglect is thought to correlate with the degree of perseverations [14][15][16]18,19]. In an elegant experiment, Manly and colleagues (2002) removed left sided stimuli and showed that as the number of contralesional targets was decreased, both neglect and perseveration decreased [14].…”

How many movements in a scribble? A method for quantifying “continuous” perseveration in cancellation tasks

“…Thus they may cancel a target by producing more than one mark, or by carrying out a continuous, uninterrupted movement which produces a scribble rather than a well-formed, simple mark (“continuous perseveration,” Sandson and Albert, 1984, 1987). The topic has been debated with growing interest in the last few years, especially regarding the problem of whether perseveration intensity correlates with neglect severity: some authors reported a significant, positive correlation (e.g., Na et al, 1999; Nys et al, 2006), some others failed to find it (e.g., Pia et al, 2009; Ronchi et al, 2009). Settling such an issue would be relevant to decide whether the two deficits share some underlying mechanisms (e.g., Posner et al, 1984; Toraldo et al, 2005), or are functionally independent (e.g., Ronchi et al, 2009).…”