This study aimed to investigate whether neurological patients presenting with a bias in line bisection show specific problems in bisecting a line into two equal parts or their line bisection bias rather reflects a special case of a deficit in more generally. In the latter case, the bias should also be observed for segmentations into thirds or quarters. To address this question, six neglect patients with a line bisection bias were administered additional tasks involving horizontal lines (e.g., segmentation into thirds and quarters, number line estimation, etc.). Their performance was compared to five neglect patients without a line bisection bias, 10 patients with right hemispheric lesions without neglect, and 32 healthy controls. Most interestingly, results indicated that neglect patients with a line bisection bias also overestimated segments on the left of the line (e.g., one third, one quarter) when dissecting lines into parts smaller than halves. In contrast, such segmentation biases were more nuanced when the required line segmentation was framed as a number line estimation task with either fractions or whole numbers. Taken together, this suggests a generalization of line bisection bias towards a segmentation or proportional processing bias, which is congruent with attentional weighting accounts of line bisection/neglect. As such, patients with a line bisection bias do not seem to have specific problems bisecting a line, but seem to suffer from a more general deficit processing proportions.

中文翻译：

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线平分偏差作为比例推理的缺陷 - 来自忽视数轴估计的证据

本研究旨在调查具有线二等分偏倚的神经系统患者是否在将线二等分时表现出特定问题，或者他们的线二等分偏倚反映了更普遍的缺陷的特殊情况。在后一种情况下，还应该观察分割成三分之一或四分之一的偏差。为了解决这个问题，六名具有线平分偏差的忽视患者被执行了涉及水平线的额外任务（例如，分割成三分之一和四分之一，数线估计等）。他们的表现与 5 名没有线平分偏倚的被忽视患者、10 名没有被忽视的右半球病变患者以及 32 名健康对照进行了比较。最有趣的是，结果表明，当将线分割成小于一半的部分时，具有线平分偏差的忽视患者也会高估线左侧的片段（例如三分之一、四分之一）。相比之下，当所需的线分割被构建为具有分数或整数的数轴估计任务时，这种分割偏差更加微妙。总而言之，这表明线平分偏差向分割或比例处理偏差的推广，这与线平分/忽略的注意力加权解释是一致的。因此，具有线平分偏差的患者似乎没有平分线的具体问题，但似乎患有更普遍的处理比例缺陷。