Authors: Federica Rastelli MariaJesus Funes Juan Lupiáñez Christophe Duret Paolo Bartolomeo
Publish Date: 2008/02/27
Volume: 187, Issue: 3, Pages: 439-446
Abstract
Attention can be directed to spatial locations or to objects in space Patients with left unilateral spatial neglect are slow to respond to a leftsided target when it is preceded by a rightsided “invalid” cue particularly at short cuetarget intervals suggesting an impairment in disengaging attention from the right side in order to orient it leftward We wondered whether this deficit is purely spatial or it is influenced by the presence of a rightsided visual object To answer this question we tested 10 right braindamaged patients with chronic leftneglect and 41 control participants on a cued response time RT detection task in which targets could appear in either of two lateral boxes In different conditions noninformative peripheral cues either consisted in the brightening of the contour of one lateral box onset cue condition or in the complete disappearance of one lateral box offset cue condition The target followed the cue at different stimulusonset asynchronies SOAs If the disengagement deficit DD is purely spacebased then it should not vary across the two cueing conditions With onset cues patients showed a typical DD at short SOAs With offset cues however the DD disappeared Thus patients did not show any DD when there was no object from which attention must be disengaged These findings indicate that the attentional bias in leftneglect does not concern spatial locations per se but visual objects in space
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