Visuomotor Processing in Unilateral Neglect

doi:10.1006/ccog.1998.0363

Consciousness and Cognition

Volume 7, Issue 3, September 1998, Pages 381-409

https://doi.org/10.1006/ccog.1998.0363 Get rights and content

Abstract

The extent to which visual information on the contralateral, unattended side influences the performance of patients with hemispatial neglect was studied in a visuomotor reaching task. We replicated the well-established finding that, relative to target-alone trials, normal subjects are slower to reach to targets in the presence of visual distractors which appear either ipsilateral or contralateral to the target, with greater interference in the former condition. Six patients with hemispatial neglect showed even greater interference than did the normal subjects when the distractor appeared ipsilaterally but showed no significant interference from contralateral distractors. This pattern of performance was qualitatively similar for patients with lesions restricted to posterior regions and for patients with more extensive lesions involving both posterior and anterior brain regions. These findings suggest that, in the visuomotor domain, information on the contralateral side is processed minimally, if at all, in patients with hemispatial neglect.

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Citation Excerpt :
Our findings are also interesting in the context of the discussion about the visuomotor consequences of visual neglect. Early reports suggested that the spatial bias found in visual neglect also affects their reaching and grasping behaviour (Behrmann & Meegan, 1998; Fisk & Goodale, 1988; Harvey, Milner, & Roberts, 1994; Heilman, Bowers, Coslett, Whelan, & Watson, 1985; Husain, Mattingley, Rorden, Kennard, & Driver, 2000; Jackson, Newport, Husain, Harvey, & Hindle, 2000; Mattingley, Bradshaw, & Phillips, 1992; Mattingley, Husain, Rorden, Kennard, & Driver, 1998). However, work by Karnath and colleagues (Himmelbach & Karnath, 2003; Karnath, Dick, & Konczak, 1997; Konczak & Karnath, 1998) suggest that the visuomotor deficits are not neglect-specific and are also shared by other patients with right-hemispheric lesions.
Patients with unilateral neglect tend to ignore sensory information from their contralesional hemispace. Many symptoms of neglect can be reduced by exposing patients to rightward-shifting prism goggles. It was noted that the effects on neglect symptoms last for at least two hours. This seems surprising in light of the fact that the after-effect of prism adaptation in healthy subjects lasts only for a few trials. To account for this discrepancy Michel et al. (2003) referred to anecdotal observations which suggested that neglect patients show little awareness of prism-induced spatial errors. They argued that this lack of awareness might interfere with more conscious attempts to compensate for the prism goggles (called strategic control) and thereby enhance the effects of more implicit corrective mechanisms (called spatial realignment) leading to more pronounced and longer-lasting after-effects. We examined this hypothesis in a group of neglect patients, patients with right-hemispheric lesions but no neglect and a group of healthy age-matched controls. Our findings confirm that strategic control mechanisms are impaired in neglect patients. However, their after-effects seem neither reduced nor pathologically increased, thereby suggesting that the two mechanisms of prism adaptation, namely strategic control and spatial realignment are quite independent of each other. Furthermore we found that these deficits are quite specific for neglect since other patients with right-hemisphere lesions but no neglect are not impaired in this task. We discuss the implications of our findings for our understanding of visual neglect, prism adaptation and the perception and action model.
Control over Conflict during Movement Preparation: Role of Posterior Parietal Cortex
2008, Neuron
Flexible behavior in humans often requires that rapid choices be made between conflicting action plans. Although much attention has focused on prefrontal regions, little is understood about the contribution of parietal cortex under situations of response conflict. Here we show that right parietal damage associated with spatial neglect leads to paradoxical facilitation (speeding) of rightward movements in the presence of conflicting leftward response plans. These findings indicate a critical role for parietal regions in action planning when there is response competition. In contrast, patients with prefrontal damage have an augmented cost of conflict for both leftward and rightward movements. The results suggest involvement of two independent systems in situations of response conflict, with right parietal cortex being a crucial site for automatic activation of competing motor plans and prefrontal regions acting independently to inhibit action plans irrelevant to current task goals.
The cognitive and neural correlates of "tactile consciousness": A multisensory perspective
2008, Consciousness and Cognition
Citation Excerpt :
Berti et al. concluded that in their patient, 3D tactile representations might have been accessed implicitly and pre-attentively. It is, however, important to note here that in studies of visual neglect it has been proposed that the difference between more explicit kinds of tasks (e.g., identification) versus more implicit tasks (i.e., forced choice, priming, same/different judgments) may be related to the “quality” of the representation involved in the performance of the different tasks (e.g., Behrmann & Meegan, 1998; Volpe et al., 1979). Specifically, a comparatively more degraded representation can be sufficient to support same-different judgments or priming effects (e.g., Làdavas et al., 1993, 1997), but may be insufficient for tasks such as identification or reading.
People’s awareness of tactile stimuli has been investigated in far less detail than their awareness of stimuli in other sensory modalities. In an attempt to fill this gap, we provide an overview of studies that are pertinent to the topic of tactile consciousness. We discuss the results of research that has investigated phenomena such as “change blindness”, phantom limb sensations, and numerosity judgments in tactile perception, together with the results obtained from the study of patients affected by deficits that can adversely affect tactile perception such as neglect, extinction, and numbsense. The similarities as well as some of the important differences that have emerged when visual and tactile conscious information processing have been compared using similar experimental procedures are highlighted. We suggest that conscious information processing in the tactile modality cannot be separated completely from the more general processing of spatial information in the brain. Finally, the importance of considering tactile consciousness within the larger framework of multisensory information processing is also discussed.
Action control in visual neglect
2006, Neuropsychologia
Citation Excerpt :
In principle, any slowing of movement initiation might be attributable to deficits in several components of the reach control system, including selection of targets, their localisation and computation of the motor command, or indeed any combination of these factors. That a deficit in target selection is likely to be a contributing factor in neglect is attested to by studies that have demonstrated deficits in initiating movements contralesionally when there are competing ipsilesional distractors (Behrmann & Meegan, 1998; Husain et al., 2000). In healthy individuals, right-sided distractors slow movement with the right arm to left-sided targets – 35 ms increment in reaction time (Hodges, Lyons, Cockell, Reed, & Elliott, 1997).
Patients with unilateral neglect show a variety of impairments when reaching towards objects in contralesional space. The basis of these deficits could be perceptual, motor or at one of the intermediate stages linking these processes. Here, we review studies of visually guided reaching in neglect and integrate these results with findings from normal human and monkey action control. We consider evidence which shows that neglect patients can be slow to initiate or execute reaches particularly to a contralesional target. We discuss the directional and spatial deficits that may interact to contribute to such reaching abnormalities and highlight the importance of effective target selection and on-line guidance, exploring the idea that deficits in these mechanisms underlie increased susceptibility to ipsilesional visual distraction in neglect. We also examine the relationship between optic ataxia and neglect by considering two illustrative cases, one with pure optic ataxia and the other with optic ataxia plus neglect, which reveal differences in the anatomical substrates of the two syndromes.
We conclude that many patients with neglect make abnormal visually guided reaches, but the pattern of reaching deficits is highly variable, most likely reflecting heterogeneity of lesion location across subjects. Rather than being specific to the neglect syndrome, abnormalities of reaching in these patients may correspond to the extent of damage to the visuomotor control system which involves critical regions in both the parietal and frontal cortex, the white matter tracts connecting them and subcortical regions. Thus, the action control deficits in neglect may be conceptualised as a range of impairments affecting multiple stages in the visuomotor control process.
Perceptual, premotor and motor factors in the performance of a delayed-reaching task by subjects with unilateral spatial neglect
2006, Neuropsychologia
We used a computerized delayed-reaching task with a simple reaction time (RT) to investigate the visuo-motor and spatio-temporal performance of right brain-damaged (RBD) patients with unilateral spatial neglect (USN). Fifty-three RBD patients (22 with and 31 without USN) and 25 controls performed the tasks. We recorded the following data: the first RT (RT-1), which is thought to reflect the detection of the target position (the perceptual factor); the second RT (RT-2), which represents the initiation of reaching (the motor initiation aspect of premotor factors); the movement time (MT), which is hypothesized to reflect the “pure” motor component of the task. RBD patients with both USN and hemianopia demonstrated significantly longer RTs towards the left than towards the right for both the RT-1 and the RT-2. Among the RBD patients without hemianopia, the laterality index (left side/right side) of the RT-1 in those with USN was significantly greater than in those without USN or the controls. Among the three groups, there were no significant differences between the laterality indices of either the RT-2s or the MTs. These results suggest that the impairment of leftward movement in RBD patients with USN might be caused primarily by a perceptual impairment rather than an impairment in motor initiation, and is certainly not a “pure” motor impairment.
Reduced endogenous control in alien hand syndrome: Evidence from naturalistic action
2005, Neuropsychologia
Patients with alien hand (AH) syndrome from medial frontal lesions exhibit involuntary but seemingly purposeful contralesional upper limb movements. Two observations about AH patients have received little, if any, experimental confirmation. The first is that AH is triggered opportunistically by nearby objects. The second is that AH behaviors are increased in conditions of fatigue or anxiety, i.e. under reduced attentional control. A prominent account explains AH as reduced intention-driven (endogenous) executive control. This account predicts that erroneous AH behaviors should be driven by environmental (i.e. exogenous) factors, such as distractor proximity to the hand. AH errors should be less influenced by the intention or action plan (i.e. endogenous factors), such as the semantic relatedness of distractors to targets. Moreover, due to capacity limitations of the endogenous controller, AH behaviors should increase under conditions of secondary task load. We tested these predictions with an AH patient in two experiments using a naturalistic coffee-making task. Experiment 1 demonstrated that the affected hand was highly perseverative and strongly influenced by exogenous but not endogenous factors. The non-alien hand made fewer errors. Experiment 2 showed that there was a disproportionate increase in perseverations and exogenous errors of the affected hand under secondary task load. The non-alien hand was significantly less disrupted by dual task conditions. These data provide experimental support for previous anecdotal observations about AH behavior in naturalistic settings, and are consistent with a unilateral defect in endogenous control.

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^☆: S. JacksonS. Tipper

^f1: Address correspondence and reprint requests to Marlene Behrmann, Department of Psychology, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA 15213-3890. E-mail:[email protected].

^f2: *Dan Meegan is presently at the Communications Research Centre, Ottawa, Canada.

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Regular ArticleVisuomotor Processing in Unilateral Neglect☆

Abstract

Brain and Cognition

Neuropsychologia

Neuropsychologia

Cortex

Neuropsychologia

Neuropsychologia

Neuropsychologia

Neuropsychologia

Cortex

Neuropsychologia

Neuropsychologia

Neuropsychologia

Cortex

Neuropsychologia

Neuropsychologia

Neuropsychologia

Neuropsychologia

A simple test of visual neglect

Neurology

The effects of brain damage on selective reaching

Selection and action

Visual extinction and stimulus repetition

Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience

Spatial reference frames and hemispatial neglect

Perceptual and conceptual factors in neglect dyslexia: Two contrasting case studies

Brain

Attention accesses multiple reference frames: Evidence from neglect

Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance

Visual processing without awareness: Evidence from unilateral neglect

Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience

Mental representation in unilateral neglect and related disorders: The twentieth Bartlett memorial lecture

Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology

Perceptual and premotor factors of unilateral neglect

Neurology

Hemineglect in humans

Recovery in hemispatial neglect

Neurology

Evaluation of a bedside battery for hemispatial neglect in acute stroke

Journal of Clinical and Experimental Neuropsychology

Directional hypokinesia in spatial hemineglect: A case study

Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery and Psychiatry

Action, perception, cognition and the inferior parietal cortex

Trends in Cognitive Sciences

Right hemisphere contributions to lexical semantics

Study of selective reaching and grasping in a patient with a unilateral parietal lesion: Dissociated effects of residual spatial neglect

Brain

Activating response codes by stimuli in the neglected visual field

Neuropsychology

Mechanisms of spatial attention: The relation of macrostructure to microstructure in parietal neglect

Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience

Directional hypokinesia and hemispatial inattention in neglect

Brain

Orienting to extinguished signals in hemispatial neglect

Psychological Science

Spatial extinction on double asynchronous stimulation

Neuropsychologia

Preserved figure-ground segregation and symmetry perception in visual neglect

Nature

Sensorimotor aspects of unilateral neglect: A single case analysis

Cognitive Neuropsychology

Neglect dyslexia and the early visual processing of letters in words and nonwords

Cognitive Neuropsychology

Visual perception and visual awareness after brain damage: A tutorial review

Regular Article
Visuomotor Processing in Unilateral Neglect☆