Abstract
One question central to all domains of attention research concerns the understanding how attentional capacities are controlled. Accordingly, the study of attentional functioning in split-brain patients has long focused on investigating the degree to which attention is independently controlled in the two cerebral hemispheres. In particular, severing the corpus callosum disrupts the ability of the two hemispheres to directly communicate. As a result, each hemisphere in the split-brain patient is thus believed to function in a relatively independent manner, a condition that is ideal for examining the laterality of attentional control processes. For example, if a split-brain patient is given a visual search task to perform, at least three different results may be obtained, each of which is informative regarding the implementation of attentional control processes in cortex. If each hemisphere can independently search the display elements in the contralateral visual hemifield, it would suggest that the control processes mediating visual search exist in parallel within each hemisphere. Conversely, if only one of the two hemispheres shows an ability to perform visual search, it would support the proposal that control processes are lateralized to that hemisphere. Finally, if a split-brain patient is unable to perform the visual search task, it would mean that attentional processes underlying visual search are distributed—or integrated—across the two cerebral hemispheres.
Published Version
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