Parietal lobe mechanisms of spatial attention: Modality-specific or supramodal?

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Abstract

Is the spatial attention system divided into separate, modality-specific subsystems, or is there a supramodal spatial attention system? More specifically, does the role of the parietal lobe in spatial attention involve modality-specific or supramodal mechanisms? We addressed this question using a variant of Posner's spatial cuing task. Parietal-lesioned patients performed a simple reaction time task to lateralized visual target stimuli, preceded on each trial by either non-predictive lateralized visual cue stimuli or non-predictive lateralized auditory cue stimuli. With both types of cues, we found disproportionate slowness in responding to invalidly cued contralesional targets, indicative of an impairment in disengaging attention from the ipsilesional to the contralesional side of space. The finding of an attentional disengagement impairment for visual targets with auditory cues implies that the parietal lobe's attentional mechanism operates on a representation of space in which both visual and auditory stimuli are represented, in other words, a supramodal representation of space.

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    The executive control of attention is the brain system devoted to inhibit competing messages reaching from sources deemed irrelevant and to support the processing of multisensory inputs from relevant sources (Diamond, 2013; Fan, Flombaum, McCandliss, Thomas, & Posner, 2003; Fan, Fossella, Sommer, Wu, & Posner, 2003; Fan et al., 2009; Fan, Hof, Guise, Fossella, & Posner, 2008; Fan et al., 2007; Martín-Signes, Paz-Alonso, & Chica, 2019; Mullane, Lawrence, Corkum, Klein, & McLaughlin, 2016; Posner, 2012; Spagna, Dong, et al., 2015; Spagna, Kim, Wu, & Fan, 2018; Tian et al., 2016; Trautwein et al., 2016). This system has been shown to act supramodally by integrating stimuli coming from different modalities and cognitive domains, and is in charge of the conflict resolution among competing stimuli to promote an efficient interaction with the environment (Donohue, Liotti, Perez, & Woldorff, 2012; Farah, Wong, Monheit, & Morrow, 1989; Green, Doesburg, Ward, & McDonald, 2011; Ljubojevic et al., 2018; Martín-Signes et al., 2019; Ricciardi, Bonino, Pellegrini, & Pietrini, 2014; Roberts & Hall, 2008; Spagna et al., 2017; Spagna, Mackie, & Fan, 2015). The existence of a unified supramodal function better manages the economic trade-offs inherent in all the biological organisms (Bullmore & Sporns, 2012), while allowing to efficiently coordinate multisensory information as opposed to modality-dependent centres, but comes with the cost of stricter amount of resources available (Kriegeskorte & Douglas, 2018; Spagna, Mackie, et al., 2015).

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