Biases in Visuo-Spatial Attention: from Assessment to Experimental Induction
| Autor: | Blini, Elvio A. |
|---|---|
| Jazyk: | angličtina |
| Rok vydání: | 2016 |
| Předmět: |
Settore M-PSI/01 - Psicologia Generale
Eye Movements Subjective Visual Vertical Mental Arithmetic Attentional Load Galvanic Vestibular Stimulation Visual Extinction Multitasking Graph Analysis Psychological Refractory Period Line Bisection Unilateral Spatial Neglect Spatial Attention Working Memory Load Attentional Asymmetries Left Hemisphere Lesion Neuropsychological Deficits Stroke Peripersonal Space Virtual Reality Optokinetic Stimulation Subjective Straight Ahead Vestibular Cortex Spatial Representations Reward Attentional Capture Value-driven Attentional Capture Cingulate-Opercular Network Clustering Coefficient Resting-state fMRI Brain Connectivity M-PSI/02 Psicobiologia e psicologia fisiologica Settore M-PSI/02 - Psicobiologia e Psicologia Fisiologica M-PSI/01 Psicologia generale |
| Popis: | In this work I present several studies, which might appear rather heterogeneous for both experimental questions and methodological approaches, and yet are linked by a common leitmotiv: spatial attention. I will address issues related to the assessment of attentional asymmetries, in the healthy individual as in patients with neurological disorders, their role in various aspects of human cognition, and their neural underpinning, driven by the deep belief that spatial attention plays an important role in various mental processes that are not necessarily confined to perception. What follows is organized into two distinct sections. In the first I will focus on the evaluation of visuospatial asymmetries, starting from the description of a new paradigm particularly suitable for this purpose. In the first chapter I will describe the effects of multitasking in a spatial monitoring test; the main result shows a striking decreasing in detection performance as a function of the introduced memory load. In the second chapter I will apply the same paradigm to a clinical population characterized by a brain lesion affecting the left hemisphere. Despite a standard neuropsychological battery failed to highlight any lateralized attentional deficit, I will show that exploiting concurrent demands might lead to enhanced sensitivity of diagnostic tests and consequently positive effects on patients’ diagnostic and therapeutic management. Finally, in the third chapter I will suggest, in light of preliminary data, that attentional asymmetries also occur along the sagittal axis; I will argue, in particular, that more attentional resources appear to be allocated around peripersonal space, the resulting benefits extending to various tasks (i.e., discrimination tasks). Then, in the second section, I will follow a complementary approach: I will seek to induce attentional shifts in order to evaluate their role in different cognitive tasks. In the fourth and fifth chapters this will be pursued exploiting sensory stimulations: visual optokinetic stimulation and galvanic vestibular stimulation, respectively. In the fourth chapter I will show that spatial attention is highly involved in numerical cognition, this relationship being bidirectional. Specifically, I will show that optokinetic stimulation modulates the occurrence of procedural errors during mental arithmetics, and that calculation itself affects oculomotor behaviour in turn. In the fifth chapter I will examine the effects of galvanic vestibular stimulation, a particularly promising technique for the rehabilitation of lateralized attention disorders, on spatial representations. I will discuss critically a recent account for unilateral spatial neglect, suggesting that vestibular stimulations or disorders might indeed affect the metric representation of space, but not necessarily resulting in spatial unawareness. Finally, in the sixth chapter I will describe an attentional capture phenomenon by intrinsically rewarding distracters. I will seek, in particular, to predict the degree of attentional capture from resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging data and the related brain connectivity pattern; I will report preliminary data focused on the importance of the cingulate-opercular network, and discuss the results through a parallel with clinical populations characterized by behavioural addictions. |
| Databáze: | OpenAIRE |
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