Speed impairs attending on the left: Comparing attentional asymmetries for neglect patients in speeded and unspeeded cueing tasks

Frontiers in Human Neuroscience

Gail A Eskes¹  Mary Beth eMacIsaac¹  Kristie R Dukewich¹  Stephen J Phillips¹  Raymond M Klein¹  Michael A Lawrence¹ 

[1] Dalhousie University;

关键词: Attention;    spatial cueing;    temporal order judgements;    unilateral neglect;    disengage deficit;   

DOI  :  10.3389/fnhum.2012.00232

来源: DOAJ

【 摘 要 】

Visuospatial neglect after stroke is often characterized by a disengage deficit on a cued orienting task, in which individuals are disproportionately slower to respond to targets presented on the contralesional side of space following an ispilesional cue as compared to the reverse.The purpose of this study was to investigate the generality of the finding of a disengage deficit on another measure of cued attention, the temporal order judgment (TOJ) task, that does not depend upon speeded manual responses.Individuals with right hemisphere stroke with and without spatial neglect and older healthy controls were tested with both a speeded RT cueing task and an unspeeded TOJ-with-cuing task.All stroke patients evidenced a disengage deficit on the speeded RT cueing task, although the size and direction of the bias was not associated with the severity of neglect.In contrast, few neglect patients showed a disengage deficit on the TOJ task.This discrepancy suggests that the disengage deficit may be related to task demands, rather than solely due to impaired attentional mechanisms per se. Further, the results of our study show that the disengage deficit is neither necessary nor sufficient for neglect to manifest.

【 授权许可】

Unknown