You are here

Article Text

Article menu
Download PDFPDF
Paper
Effects of left parietal injury on covert orienting of attention
  1. U Castiello1,2,
  2. M Paine2,3
  1. 1Department of Psychology, Royal Holloway, University of London, Egham, Surrey TW20 0EX, UK
  2. 2Department of Clinical Neuroscience, St Vincent's Hospital, Melbourne, Australia
  3. 3Neuro-Ophthalmology Clinic, Royal Victorian Eye and Ear Hospital, Melbourne, Australia
  1. Correspondence to:
 Dr U Castiello, Department of Psychology, Royal Holloway, University of London, Egham, Surrey TW20 0EX, UK;
 u.castiello{at}rhul.ac.uk

Abstract

Objective: To assess the effects of left parietal injury on covert visual attention during a detection task and a pointing task.

Methods: The Posner's paradigm was given to a patient who was found at the age of 74 to have spent all his life without the left parietal lobe as a result of a congenital perinatal insult and to a control subject. In one session subjects were required to provide an arbitrary response at stimulus appearance (key press). In another session subjects were required to point to the stimulus.

Results: The patient was able to disengage covert attention from a cued position when the task was to provide an arbitrary key press response in a similar fashion to a control subject with no neurological deficits. By contrast, he was impaired in disengaging attention from a cued position when the task was to reprogramme an overt pointing action.

Conclusions: Response to cued information is differentially available depending on task. It is suggested that mechanisms concerned with the attention for action systems are located within the left parietal lobe.

  • parietal injury
  • orienting of attention

https://doi.org/10.1136/jnnp.72.1.73

Statistics from Altmetric.com

    Request Permissions

    If you wish to reuse any or all of this article please use the link below which will take you to the Copyright Clearance Center’s RightsLink service. You will be able to get a quick price and instant permission to reuse the content in many different ways.

    View Full Text

    Footnotes