To select information relevant to our goals, we orient our attention towards the objects present in our environment. Brain damage may impair these mechanisms, thus provoking a unilateral spatial neglect. About half of the patients with a lesion in the right hemisphere suffer from neglect for the left side of space. They are unaware of the left half of their environment, and have a poor functional outcome. My research has tested several proposed explanations of neglect, and shown that neither the loss of the left half of a cognitive representation of space, nor the rightward shift of an egocentric frame of reference, nor an impairment in producing arm movements toward the left can explain neglect. Instead, an association of attentional deficits seems typical of unilateral neglect. These deficits operate in a specific temporal sequence; an early attraction of attention toward the right is followed by an impairment in redirecting attention toward the left. My current research is trying to establish the precise nature of these attentional deficits, as well as their neural bases.

Additional work on "higher level" visual processing concerns visual mental imagery, the faculty by which we can imagine an object in its absence, and pure alexia, an acquired reading disorder by which patients lose their ability to rapidly read words and resort to a slow, letter-by-letter reading. My results on visual mental imagery challenged the current view that imagery shares with vision mechanisms subserved by early visual cortices. My research on pure alexia demonstrated the presence of a deficit of letter identification and its relationship with word reading problems, and highlighted the crucial role of the right hemisphere in determining the characteristics of patients’ residual reading.