Saccade Processing in Hemispatial Neglect

Szymanek, L., Butler, S.H., Rossit, S. and Harvey, M. (2010) Saccade Processing in Hemispatial Neglect. In: 1st Joint Conference of the EPS and SEPEX, Granada, Spain, 15-17 Apr 2010, (Unpublished)

Abstract

It has previously been reported, that the frontal lobe plays an important role in the inhibition of eye-movements and that patients with frontal lesions show increased problems in suppressing unwanted pro-saccades. Nevertheless, Butler et al. (2009) found evidence that patients with posterior lesions suffering from hemispatial neglect are also unable to perform correct anti-saccades. Here we investigated whether this deficit could be driven by an inhibition failure. We tested patients with hemispatial neglect after right hemisphere stroke in a pro-, anti-saccade and fixation task paradigm. For the anti-saccades, the neglect patients showed a bilateral impairment, in that they produced incorrect pro-saccades towards left and right stimuli. Pro-saccades could be executed but their accuracy was reduced especially towards left targets. In the fixation condition, patients showed an increased amount of false pro-saccades towards the right stimuli only. As previous argued the data support the interpretation that with a right stimulus, the neglect patients code the location accurately, but fail to suppress the right pro-saccade in favour of the leftward anti-saccade. For the left target it may be that the target location is not coded accurately in the first place (even pro-saccades fall short of the target) thus precluding vector inversion.

• Item Type: Conference Proceedings
• Status: Unpublished
• Refereed: No
• Glasgow Author(s) Enlighten ID: Harvey, Professor Monika and Rossit, Miss Stephanie and Szymanek, Dr Larissa
• Authors: Szymanek, L., Butler, S.H., Rossit, S., and Harvey, M.
• Subjects: B Philosophy. Psychology. Religion > BF Psychology
• College/School: College of Science and Engineering > School of Psychology