A review of the evidence for a disengage deficit following parietal lobe damage
Section snippets
Background
A century has passed since the first description of visuospatial neglect following posterior hemispheric damage [23], and, although progress has been achieved in the interim, an understanding of the underlying mechanism of neglect has been elusive. In the last two decades, stimulated by behavioral paradigms developed within cognitive psychology, the focus of attempts to understand visuospatial neglect has shifted from purely sensori-motor (e.g. [13]) to cognitive deficits, including those
Literature
Attention, as used here, is the ability to orient covertly (that is without shifts in gaze direction) to objects/locations in space [42]. Covert orienting can be accomplished in either a reflexive or controlled manner; that is, attention may be reflexively drawn to an abrupt change in the environment or we can voluntarily deploy our attention toward one location or one object in the visual field, in response to instructions or probabilities. Following Posner [42] and Klein et al. [31] we will
General approach
Peer-reviewed papers reporting on the disengage deficit published in the last 16 years were reviewed. Fourteen papers were retrieved from the PSYCLIT and MEDLINE databases. Ten papers were selected on the basis of information about patient performance and orienting paradigm provided in the article. Two papers that were not included in the review reported on the disengage phenomenon using paradigms other than visual orienting (e.g. cancellation tasks [15]), or reported on patients with bilateral
How is the disengage deficit affected by cuing protocol (endogenous vs exogenous orienting)?
We classified each subject‘s data according to whether they were exposed to a purely endogenous, purely exogenous, or hybrid (exogenous cues with meaning) orienting paradigm. The data from patients with RH lesions, collapsed across the SOAs used in each study, are shown in Fig. 2.3
General discussion
The data currently available on the disengage deficit following parietal damage are more definitive in their outcomes when combined than when examined on a study-by-study basis. The disengage deficit is robustly observed when attention is drawn to a cue in the periphery (whether or not the cue is informative). However, when attention is manipulated by purely endogenous means, the disengage deficit is often not apparent. Following a peripheral cue the disengage deficit is large at short
Summary
The present review provides the first opportunity to evaluate all available data on the visual orienting of patients with parietal damage. Our findings are clear. Unilateral damage to the parietal area affects an individual‘s ability to respond to targets presented in the contralesional side of space. In particular, and as expected, patients with right-parietal damage were slower to respond to invalidly cued targets in contralesional space compared to responses in ipsilesional space.
References (57)
- et al.
Visual feature integration with an attention deficit
Brain and Cognition
(1994) - et al.
Temporal aspects of visual search studied by transcrannial magnetic stimulation
Neuropsychologica
(1997) - et al.
Line bisection and cognitive plasticity of unilateral neglect of space
Brain and Cognition
(1983) - et al.
Early rightwards orienting of attention on simple reaction time performance in patients with left-sided neglect
Neuropsychologia
(1992) - et al.
Parietal lobe mechanisms of spatial attention: modality-specific or supramodal?
Neuropsychologia
(1989) Mechanisms of unilateral neglect
Inhibition of return
Trends in Cognitive Sciences
(2000)- et al.
Automatic and voluntary orienting of attention in patients with visual neglect: horizontal and vertical dimensions
Neuropsychologia
(1994) - et al.
Object vision and spatial vision: two cortical pathways
Trends in Neuroscience
(1983) - et al.
How do the parietal lobes direct covert attention?
Neuropsychologia
(1987)
The effects of cueing on unilateral neglect
Neuropsychologia
Neural circuits for spatial attention and unilateral neglect
The anatomy of spatial neglect in humans
Impaired shifting of attention in Balint‘s Syndrome
Brain and Cognition
Components of visual attention
Brain
Unilateral neglect, representational schema and consciousness
Brain
Is Posner‘s “beam” the same as Treisman‘s “glue”?: on the relation between visual orienting and feature integration theory
Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance
Feature integration and spatial attention: more evidence of a dissociation between endogenous and exogenous orienting
Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance
Attention and feature integration: illusory conjuctions in a patient with parietal lobe lesions
Psychological Science
Mechanism of spatial attention: the relation of macrostructure to microstructure in parietal neglect
Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience
Attentional modulation of neural processing of shape, color and velocity in humans
Science
Orienting to extinguished signals in hemispatial neglect
Psychological Science
Amorphosynthesis from left parietal lesion
Archives of Neurology and Psychiatry
Search deficits in neglect patients are dependent on size of the visual scene
Neuropsychology
Shifting visual attention between objects and locations: evidence from normal and parietal lesion subjects
Journal of Experimental Psychology: General
Spatial attention deficits in humans: a comparison of superior parietal and temporal-parietal junction lesions
Neuropsychology
Left neglect for near but not far space in man
Nature
Cited by (168)
Disengagement of attention with spatial neglect: A systematic review of behavioral and anatomical findings
2024, Neuroscience and Biobehavioral ReviewsEnhanced disengagement of auditory attention and phonological skills in action video gamers
2022, Computers in Human BehaviorCitation Excerpt :In addition, a marginal difference was found in the number of errors in the meaningless text (W = 217, p = .073), with the NAVG group making more errors than the AVG group. Given that a significant group by cue condition (but no group by cue condition by SOA) interaction was found, we computed the mean of cuing effects across all SOAs for each participant, as an index of the efficiency of auditory attentional disengagement (note that smaller cuing effects are thought to reflect more efficient attentional disengagement; Losier & Klein, 2001). Moreover two composite scores reflecting theoretically relevant constructs were computed: a phonological composite score, computed by averaging performance obtained on the three auditory phonological tasks, i.e., FRS, BRS and phoneme deletion (for all correlation coefficients, ps < .02) and a text reading composite score, tapping into lexical reading processes, and obtained by averaging the text reading, text reading with comprehension and meaningless text reading tasks (for all correlation coefficients, ps < .001).