The Japanese journal of neuropsychology

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ArticleTitle	Preserved eye contact and pursuit eye movements for human bodies in a patient with progressive Bálint syndrome
Language	J
AuthorList	Yuriko Kakiki
Affiliation	Yamanoue Hospital
Publication	Japanese Journal of Neuropsychology: 28 (4), 257-265, 2012
Received	Jan 6, 2011
Accepted	Oct 27, 2011
Abstract	Posterior cortical atrophy (PCA) is a degenerative disease that causes dysfunction of the posterior hemispheric regions. A female patient with imaging results suggestive of PCA showed severe Bálint syndrome. The patient was unable to fixate any common objects presented in her field of vision, while she showed eye contact with a person and moved her eyes to follow the person's head motion. Two years after this initial observation, her conscious visual object perception was completely lost. However, the eye movements to follow moving persons appeared consistently. These characteristic eye movements suggest that the patient had an ability to unconsciously identify the eyes in a face or human bodies in the visual scene. In the course of the pathological change in the bilateral parieto-occipital regions, the primitive neural mechanism of visually capturing the eyes or the body of a human may have been released to contribute to appearance of eye movements restricted to the eyes or the human body.
Keywords	posterior cortical atrophy, Bálint syndrome, eye contact, blindsight, superior temporal sulcus