Selective attention and perceptual awareness: Testing the competitive interaction hypothesis
Final Report Abstract
Our ability to perceive multiple simultaneously-presented visual targets is essential in everyday real-world situations such as driving, team sports, and videogame playing. The overarching goal of our project was to elucidate the mechanisms and anatomy of perceptual awareness in multi-target environments and its failure in extinction patients. A popular and informative approach to determining the anatomy of perception in multi-target environments is to perform lesion-behaviour mapping analyses using the imaging data from extinction patients. In our project, we contributed important methodological advances that address several methodological issues that have previously limited both the practical use and the theoretical informativeness of the lesion-behaviour mapping approach: 1) we evaluated and implemented the Clusterize algorithm, which is capable of significantly speeding up lesion demarcation in the most commonly used imaging modalities, 2) we described a representative topology of acute stroke for researchers to refer to when performing lesion-behaviour mapping analyses, 3) we demonstrated that the combination of acute imaging and acute behaviour represents the ideal dataset when performing lesion-behaviour mapping analyses, and 4) we demonstrated that conclusions from lesion-behaviour mapping analyses may vary as a function of the anatomical atlas used. Several authors have suggested that in addition to a lateralised spatio-attentional bias, non-lateralised reductions of attentional capacity are necessary for extinction to occur. In our project, we examined the predictions that follow from this suggestion. We were able to show 1) that the presence of a spatio-attentional bias alone is not a sufficient precondition for extinction, and 2) that lateralised and non-lateralised components of attention interact during attentional performance. We also investigated the prediction that inducing a spatio-attentional bias in situations where attentional capacity is reduced would elicit extinction-like behaviour in neurologically healthy subjects. Unfortunately, however, our results here do currently not allow a clear-cut interpretation. The existing literature suggests a critical role for either the right TPJ or the right IPS in extinction, suggesting that both areas are important for our ability to perceive multiple targets simultaneously. In our project, we examined the distinct attentional contributions of the right TPJ and the right IPS. We were able to show that the IPS is associated with non-lateralised attentional sub-processes and in particular attentional capacity, whereas the TPJ, as a function of baseline spatio-attentional bias, is more directly associated with perceptual awareness in multi-target environments.
Publications
- (2015). Early sensory processing in right hemispheric stroke patients with and without extinction. Neuropsychologia 73: 141–150
de Haan B, Stoll T, Karnath H-O
(See online at https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2015.05.011) - (2015). Fast semi-automated lesion demarcation in stroke. NeuroImage: Clinical 9: 69-74
de Haan B, Clas P, Juenger H, Wilke M, Karnath H-O
(See online at https://doi.org/10.1016/j.nicl.2015.06.013) - (2016). Topography of acute stroke in a sample of 439 right brain damaged patients. NeuroImage: Clinical 10: 124–128
Sperber C, Karnath H-O
(See online at https://doi.org/10.1016/j.nicl.2015.11.012) - (2017). "Nonspatial" attentional deficits interact with spatial position in neglect. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 29: 911–918
Li D, Rorden C, Karnath H-O
(See online at https://doi.org/10.1162/jocn_a_01101) - (2017). 'Whose atlas I use, his song I sing?' - The impact of anatomical atlases on fiber tract contributions to cognitive deficits after stroke. NeuroImage 163: 301-309
de Haan B, Karnath H-O
(See online at https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuroimage.2017.09.051) - (2017). Investigating structure and function in the healthy human brain: validity of acute versus chronic lesion-symptom mapping. Brain Structure & Function 222: 2059-2070
Karnath H-O, Rennig J
(See online at https://doi.org/10.1007/s00429-016-1325-7) - (2017). The role of IPS and TPJ in selective attention in multi-target environments. Clinical Neurophysiology 128: e62 [Abstract]
Prass M, de Haan B
(See online at https://doi.org/10.1016/j.clinph.2016.10.228) - (2018). A hitchhiker's guide to lesion-behaviour mapping. Neuropsychologia 155: 5-16
e Haan B, Karnath H-O
(See online at https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2017.10.021)
