Ranmalee Eramudugolla

Association between auditory and visual symptoms of unilateral spatial neglect

Unilateral spatial neglect due to right brain damage (RBD) can occur in several different sensory modalities in the same patient. Previous studies of the association between auditory and visual neglect have yielded conflicting outcomes. Most such studies have compared performance on relatively simple clinical measures of visual neglect, such as target cancellation, with that on more sophisticated measures of auditory perception. This is problematic because such tasks are typically not matched for the cognitive processes they exercise. We overcame this limitation by using equivalent visual and auditory versions of extinction and temporal-order judgment (TOJ) tasks. RBD patients demonstrated lateralized deficits on both visual and auditory tasks when compared with same-aged, healthy controls. Critically, a significant association between the severity of visual and auditory deficits was apparent on the TOJ task but not the extinction task, suggesting that even when task demands are matched across modalities, dissociations between visual and auditory neglect can be apparent. Across the auditory tasks, patients showed more pronounced deficits for verbal stimuli than for non-verbal stimuli. These findings have implications for recent models proposed to explain the role of spatial attention in multimodal perception.

Effects of audio-visual integration on the detection of masked speech and non-speech sounds

Integration of simultaneous auditory and visual information about an event can enhance our ability to detect that event. This is particularly evident in the perception of speech, where the articulatory gestures of the speakers lips and face can significantly improve the listeners detection and identification of the message, especially when that message is presented in a noisy background. Speech is a particularly important example of multisensory integration because of its behavioural relevance to humans and also because brain regions have been identified that appear to be specifically tuned for auditory speech and lip gestures. Previous research has suggested that speech stimuli may have an advantage over other types of auditory stimuli in terms of audio-visual integration. Here, we used a modified adaptive psychophysical staircase approach to compare the influence of congruent visual stimuli (brief movie clips) on the detection of noise-masked auditory speech and non-speech stimuli. We found that congruent visual stimuli significantly improved detection of an auditory stimulus relative to incongruent visual stimuli. This effect, however, was equally apparent for speech and non-speech stimuli. The findings suggest that speech stimuli are not specifically advantaged by audio-visual integration for detection at threshold when compared with other naturalistic sounds.

Influence of attentional load on spatial attention in acquired and developmental disorders of attention.

Converging evidence suggests that right-hemisphere dominant spatial attention systems can be modulated by non-spatial processes such as attentional capacity. The severity of neglect in right-hemisphere stroke patients for example, is correlated with impairments in non-lateralized attention. Evidence also suggests the coexistence of lateralized inattention and reduced capacity in developmental disorders of attention, such as attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), which is marked by cognitive impairments suggestive of right hemisphere dysfunction. These lines of evidence argue against a coincident damage hypothesis and suggest instead a direct modulation of spatial attention by non-spatial processes. Here we sought experimental evidence for this relationship in both acquired and developmental disorders of attention. Six adult stroke patients with focal right brain injury and 19 children with ADHD were studied in comparison to control groups of both healthy older adults and typically developing children. The participants were required to detect transient, unilateral visual targets while simultaneously monitoring a stream of alphanumeric characters at fixation. Load at fixation was manipulated by asking participants either to ignore the central stream and focus on the peripheral detection task (no report condition), or to monitor the central stream for a probe item that was defined by either a unique feature (low load condition) or a conjunction of features (high load condition). As expected, in all participants greater load at fixation slowed responses to peripheral targets. Crucially, in right brain injured patients but not older healthy adults left target detection was slowed significantly more than central and right target detection. A qualitatively similar pattern was seen in children with ADHD, but not in typically developing children. The imposition of load at fixation slowed responses to left compared with right targets, and this response time asymmetry was correlated with the severity of ADHD symptoms. These results suggest that a direct manipulation of non-spatial attention can reveal lateralised attention deficits in both acquired and developmental forms of inattention. Our findings support the view that spatial attention networks are tightly integrated with non-lateralized aspects of attention.

Spatial gradient for unique-feature detection in patients with unilateral neglect: Evidence from auditory and visual search

Patients with unilateral spatial neglect following right hemisphere damage are impaired in detecting contralesional targets in both visual and haptic search tasks, and often show a graded improvement in detection performance for more ipsilesional spatial locations. In audition, multiple simultaneous sounds are most effectively perceived if they are distributed along the frequency dimension. Thus, attention to spectro-temporal features alone can allow detection of a target sound amongst multiple simultaneous distracter sounds, regardless of whether these sounds are spatially separated. Spatial bias in attention associated with neglect should not affect auditory search based on spectro-temporal features of a sound target. We report that a right brain damaged patient with neglect demonstrated a significant gradient favouring the ipsilesional side on a visual search task as well as an auditory search task in which the target was a frequency modulated tone amongst steady distractor tones. No such asymmetry was apparent in the auditory search performance of a control patient with a right hemisphere lesion but no neglect. The results suggest that the spatial bias in attention exhibited by neglect patients affects stimulus processing even when spatial information is irrelevant to the task.

Biased figure–ground assignment affects conscious object recognition in spatial neglect

Unilateral spatial neglect is a disorder of attention and spatial representation, in which early visual processes such as figure–ground segmentation have been assumed to be largely intact. There is evidence, however, that the spatial attention bias underlying neglect can bias the segmentation of a figural region from its background. Relatively few studies have explicitly examined the effect of spatial neglect on processing the figures that result from such scene segmentation. Here, we show that a neglect patients bias in figure–ground segmentation directly influences his conscious recognition of these figures. By varying the relative salience of figural and background regions in static, two-dimensional displays, we show that competition between elements in such displays can modulate a neglect patients ability to recognise parsed figures in a scene. The findings provide insight into the interaction between scene segmentation, explicit object recognition, and attention.