Transient unilateral spatial neglect during aura in a woman with sporadic hemiplegic migraine

Visual Perception in Migraine: A Narrative Review

Migraine, the most frequent neurological ailment, affects visual processing during and between attacks. Most visual disturbances associated with migraine can be explained by increased neural hyperexcitability, as suggested by clinical, physiological and neuroimaging evidence. Here, we review how simple (e.g., patterns, color) visual functions can be affected in patients with migraine, describe the different complex manifestations of the so-called Alice in Wonderland Syndrome, and discuss how visual stimuli can trigger migraine attacks. We also reinforce the importance of a thorough, proactive examination of visual function in people with migraine.

The Computational Anatomy of Visual Neglect

Visual neglect is a debilitating neuropsychological phenomenon that has many clinical implications and-in cognitive neuroscience-offers an important lesion deficit model. In this article, we describe a computational model of visual neglect based upon active inference. Our objective is to establish a computational and neurophysiological process theory that can be used to disambiguate among the various causes of this important syndrome; namely, a computational neuropsychology of visual neglect. We introduce a Bayes optimal model based upon Markov decision processes that reproduces the visual searches induced by the line cancellation task (used to characterize visual neglect at the bedside). We then consider 3 distinct ways in which the model could be lesioned to reproduce neuropsychological (visual search) deficits. Crucially, these 3 levels of pathology map nicely onto the neuroanatomy of saccadic eye movements and the systems implicated in visual neglect.