Abstract
People with left unilateral spatial neglect (USN) following a right brain lesion show difficulty in orienting their attention toward stimuli presented on the left. However, cuing the stimuli with gaze direction or a pointing arrow can help some of them to compensate for this difficulty. In order to build a tool that helps to identify these patients, we needed a short version of the paradigm classically used to test gaze and arow cuing effects in healthy adults, adapted to the capacities of patients with severe attention deficit. Here, we tested the robustness of the cuing effects measured by such a short version in 48 young adult healthy participants, 46 older healthy participants, 10 patients with left USN following a right brain lesion (USN+), and 10 patients with right brain lesions but no USN (USN–). We observed gaze and arrow cuing effects in all populations, independently of age and presence or absence of a right brain lesion. In the neglect field, the USN+ group showed event greater cuing effect than older healthy participants and the USN– group. We showed that gaze and arrow cuing effects are powerful enough to be detected in a very short test adapted to the capacities of older patients with severe attention deficits, which increases their applicability in rehabilitation settings. We further concluded that our test is a suitable basis to develop a tool that will help neuropsychologists to identify USN patients who respond to gaze and/or arrow cuing in their neglect field.
Highlights
Unilateral spatial neglect (USN) involves a difficulty to detect, respond to and orient one’s attention toward stimuli presented to the contralateral side of a brain lesion, which is usually located in the right hemisphere (Heilman et al, 1993)
A total of 114 right-handed native French-speaking participants were included in the study: 10 patients diagnosed with left unilateral spatial neglect (USN) (USN+) secondary to right brain damage, 10 patients with right
The ANOVA run on Gains revealed a main effect of Age, F(1, 89) = 3.99, p = 0.049, η2p = 0.04, 90% confidence intervals (CI) [0.00, 0.13]
Summary
Unilateral spatial neglect (USN) involves a difficulty to detect, respond to and orient one’s attention toward stimuli presented to (or represented on) the contralateral side of a brain lesion, which is usually located in the right hemisphere (Heilman et al, 1993). In a Cochrane review, Bowen et al (2013) highlighted the limited effect of these techniques for daily activities and the need to rely on patients’ preserved abilities during rehabilitation. Few researches have investigated gaze and arrow cuing effects in patients with USN, and those studies reported inconsistent results (see Vuilleumier, 2002, Bonato et al, 2009). We defended the view that the high heterogeneity of the lesions causing USN (Chechlacz et al, 2012; Molenberghs et al, 2012) predicts a high heterogeneity in the preservation of gaze and arrow cuing effects, which are subtended, at least partly, by specific brain mechanisms (e.g., Lockhofen et al, 2014; Sato et al, 2016; Zhao et al, 2017). We started to develop a method to identify USN patients who respond to gaze and/or arrows in their neglect field
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