Cortex; a journal devoted to the study of the nervous system and behavior
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Comparative Study Clinical Trial
Verbal dichotic listening in right and left-handed adults: laterality effects of directed attention.
Dichotic listening performance of consonant vowel stimuli was studied in 51 adult right- and left-handers in three attention conditions: non-directed and directed to either the right or left ear. In the non-directed condition, a significant right-ear advantage was found in both handedness groups with a stronger asymmetry in right-handers. There are at least three explanations for this ear bias. ⋯ The classic or structural hypothesis cannot account for these changes, thereby providing support for the attentional hypothesis. In addition, the right-handed subjects exhibited a greater shift of bias than did the left-handed subjects, when directing their attention leftward. This finding suggests that right-handed people are better able to shift their attention than left-handed people.
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In the current issue of Cortex, Pavani and colleagues show that directing gaze toward the contralesional hemifield significantly diminishes the auditory deficits associated with unilateral neglect. The authors suggest that this beneficial effect of gaze direction may arise due to the recruitment of crossmodal attentional links between audition and vision. A complementary interpretation of these findings is that directing gaze toward neglected sound sources encourages the recoding of auditory spatial location in a relatively preserved frame of reference, and that it is through this coordinate transformation process that awareness of auditory stimuli may be regained. Rehabilitation strategies aimed at recoding stimuli within relatively preserved reference frames may be a useful step forward in managing unilateral neglect.
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This review focuses on Edoardo Bisiach's particular input into the perceptual/premotor taxonomy within the neglect syndrome and assesses arguments and experimental designs that have been presented both for and against the dichotomy. Bisiach made most crucial contributions to this topic as well as increasing insights into the syndrome of hemispatial neglect more generally. Most importantly, he elucidated its relevance to visual neuropsychological and neuroscientific research.