The Big Question Pt.II

Well, I had a meeting with the adviser and you'll never guess where he thought I should go with the study: exactly where I had wanted to go in the first place! So what I wrote in the last post is not complete scrap, but the question is going to switch back to,

If we are able to induce neglect in normal subjects, will they show the same
pattern of neglect as patients?

--which at first he said was not good enough to build on, but now I guess he's changed his mind. But I don't think of all my hours of library research as a waste of time-- now, I've learned a hell of a lot about neglect, and it's given me a topic for the literature review I am being asked to write. The literature review is supposed to be on a subject similar to the thesis topic, but not exactly (they don't want us to use all the same sources).

So I explained in the last post how there are so many dissociations between neglect patients across different modalities (visuospatial, motor, tactile, auditory)-- well, I can research the different tasks that have been used to find neglect in those different modalities, and compare them to see which of those hinder or enhance performance in the neglected field. I can also look at the neurological bases for those patients who show dissociations.

So you see, it wasn't a total loss, but I wish the adviser had just given me the go-ahead with my idea in the first place. Oh well, at least I have a solid theoretical approach now, and the adviser has a good idea about how to induce neglect in normals, having found some literature where scientists have done similar things. However, once they have induced neglect, most studies just leave it at that, and they haven't tried to manipulate the targets the subjects are given, which is what I am going to do.

Relevance.