Selective Attention to Faces in a Rapid Visual Stream: Hemispheric Differences in Enhancement and Suppression of Category-selective Neural Activity

2018 ◽  
Vol 30 (3) ◽  
pp. 393-410 ◽  
Author(s):  
Genevieve Quek ◽  
Dan Nemrodov ◽  
Bruno Rossion ◽  
Joan Liu-Shuang

In daily life, efficient perceptual categorization of faces occurs in dynamic and highly complex visual environments. Yet the role of selective attention in guiding face categorization has predominantly been studied under sparse and static viewing conditions, with little focus on disentangling the impact of attentional enhancement and suppression. Here we show that attentional enhancement and suppression exert a differential impact on face categorization supported by the left and right hemispheres. We recorded 128-channel EEG while participants viewed a 6-Hz stream of object images (buildings, animals, objects, etc.) with a face image embedded as every fifth image (i.e., OOOOFOOOOFOOOOF…). We isolated face-selective activity by measuring the response at the face presentation frequency (i.e., 6 Hz/5 = 1.2 Hz) under three conditions: Attend Faces, in which participants monitored the sequence for instances of female faces; Attend Objects, in which they responded to instances of guitars; and Baseline, in which they performed an orthogonal task on the central fixation cross. During the orthogonal task, face-specific activity was predominantly centered over the right occipitotemporal region. Actively attending to faces enhanced face-selective activity much more evidently in the left hemisphere than in the right, whereas attending to objects suppressed the face-selective response in both hemispheres to a comparable extent. In addition, the time courses of attentional enhancement and suppression did not overlap. These results suggest the left and right hemispheres support face-selective processing in distinct ways—where the right hemisphere is mandatorily engaged by faces and the left hemisphere is more flexibly recruited to serve current tasks demands.

Neurology ◽  
1998 ◽  
Vol 51 (2) ◽  
pp. 458-464 ◽  
Author(s):  
D. Boatman ◽  
J. Hart ◽  
R. P. Lesser ◽  
N. Honeycutt ◽  
N. B. Anderson ◽  
...  

Objective: To investigate the right hemispheric speech perception capabilities of an adult right-handed patient with seizures.Methods: Consecutive, unilateral, intracarotid sodium amobarbital injections and left hemispheric electrical interference mapping were used to determine lateralization and localization of speech perception, measured as syllable discrimination.Results: Syllable discrimination remained intact after left and right intracarotid sodium amobarbital injections. Language otherwise strongly lateralized to the left hemisphere. Despite evidence of bilateral speech perception capabilities, electrical interference testing in the left posterior temporal lobe impaired syllable discrimination.Conclusions: The results suggest a functionally symmetric, parallel system in the adult brain with preferential use of left hemispheric pathways for speech perception.


1995 ◽  
Vol 6 (3) ◽  
pp. 157-164 ◽  
Author(s):  
Janet Metcalfe ◽  
Margaret Funnell ◽  
Michael S. Gazzaniga

Six experiments explored hemispheric memory differences in a patient who had undergone complete corpus callosum resection The right hemisphere was better able than the left to reject new events similar to originally presented materials of several types, including abstract visual forms, faces, and categorized lists of words Although the left hemisphere is capable of mental manipulation, imagination, semantic priming, and complex language production, these functions are apparently linked to memory confusions—confusions less apparent in the more literal right hemisphere Differences between the left and right hemispheres in memory for new schematically consistent or categorically related events may provide a source of information allowing people to distinguish between what they actually witnessed and what they only inferred


2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jake T. Jordan

AbstractThe left and right rodent hippocampi exhibit striking lateralization in some of the very neural substrates considered to be critical for hippocampal cognitive function. Despite this, there is an overwhelming lack of consideration for hemispheric differences in studies of the rodent hippocampus. Asymmetries identified so far suggest that a bilateral model of the hippocampus will be essential for an understanding of this brain region, and perhaps of the brain more widely. Although hypotheses have been proposed to explain how the left and right hippocampi contribute to behavior and cognition, these hypotheses have either been refuted by more recent studies or have been limited in the scope of data they explain. Here, I will first review data on human and rodent hippocampal lateralization. The implications of these data suggest that considering the hippocampus as a bilateral structure with functional lateralization will be critical moving forward in understanding the function and mechanisms of this brain region. In exploring these implications, I will then propose a hypothesis of the hippocampus as a bilateral structure. This discrete-continuous (DC) hypothesis proposes that the left and right hippocampi contribute to spatial memory and navigation in a complementary manner. Specifically, the left hemisphere stores spatial information as discrete, salient locations and that the right hemisphere represents space continuously, contributing to route computation and flexible spatial navigation. Consideration of hippocampal lateralization in designing future studies may provide insight into the function of the hippocampus and resolve debates concerning its function.


Perception ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 50 (1) ◽  
pp. 27-38
Author(s):  
Ella K. Moeck ◽  
Nicole A. Thomas ◽  
Melanie K. T. Takarangi

Attention is unequally distributed across the visual field. Due to greater right than left hemisphere activation for visuospatial attention, people attend slightly more to the left than the right side. As a result, people voluntarily remember visual stimuli better when it first appears in the left than the right visual field. But does this effect—termed a right hemisphere memory bias—also enhance involuntary memory? We manipulated the presentation location of 100 highly negative images (chosen to increase the likelihood that participants would experience any involuntary memories) in three conditions: predominantly leftward (right hemisphere bias), predominantly rightward (left hemisphere bias), or equally in both visual fields (bilateral). We measured subsequent involuntary memories immediately and for 3 days after encoding. Contrary to predictions, biased hemispheric processing did not affect short- or long-term involuntary memory frequency or duration. Future research should measure hemispheric differences at retrieval, rather than just encoding.


1995 ◽  
Vol 6 (4) ◽  
pp. 212-218 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alice Cronin-Golomb

Hemispheric differences in the recognition and manipulation of meaning may be based on distinctions in size, composition, or organization of the right and left semantic networks The present study describes these features of pictorially based semantic networks in 3 subjects with complete forebrain commissurotomy Stimuli were presented for prolonged viewing to the left and right visual hemifields For each trial, the subjects chose from a 20-choice array all pictures that were associated with a target, then indicated the member of each pair of chosen associates that was more closely related to the target The hemispheres' networks were found to be of similar size and composition, but were organized differently The right hemisphere more often produced linear rankings of semantic associates to a target than did the left, and rankings by the two hemispheres were not strongly correlated Hemispheric differences in semantic organization mirror differences in perceptual organization, with the right hemisphere specialized for conventional meaning and the left hemisphere specialized for detecting and processing deviations from standard meaning


1996 ◽  
Vol 82 (3) ◽  
pp. 1011-1018
Author(s):  
Karl F. van Orden ◽  
John F. House

The extent to which pattern reversal evoked potential amplitudes are distributed symmetrically over the scalp was investigated as a function of stimulus spatial frequency. Nine right-handed male subjects viewed sinusoidal grating stimuli of 4.0 and 0.5 c/deg phase reversed every 900 msec. A visual half-field configuration enabled selective stimulation of the right- or left-hemisphere visual cortex. Evoked responses were recorded from the 2 cm above the inion (Oz) and at 7 and 13 cm lateral to Oz. Analyses of normalized evoked response amplitudes showed a significant asymmetry for the 4.0 c/deg stimulus; right-hemisphere amplitudes declined as a function of distance from the midline, while left-hemisphere amplitudes were greatest at the 7 cm recording site. No hemispheric differences were observed for the 0.5 c/deg stimulus; amplitudes for both hemispheres declined as a function of distance from the midline. The data are discussed in terms of hemispheric differences in morphology and functional asymmetries at early levels of sensory processing.


2022 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 112
Author(s):  
Benjamin C. Gibson ◽  
Andrei Vakhtin ◽  
Vincent P. Clark ◽  
Christopher C. Abbott ◽  
Davin K. Quinn

Hemispheric differences in emotional processing have been observed for over half a century, leading to multiple theories classifying differing roles for the right and left hemisphere in emotional processing. Conventional acceptance of these theories has had lasting clinical implications for the treatment of mood disorders. The theory that the left hemisphere is broadly associated with positively valenced emotions, while the right hemisphere is broadly associated with negatively valenced emotions, drove the initial application of repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) for the treatment of major depressive disorder (MDD). Subsequent rTMS research has led to improved response rates while adhering to the same initial paradigm of administering excitatory rTMS to the left prefrontal cortex (PFC) and inhibitory rTMS to the right PFC. However, accumulating evidence points to greater similarities in emotional regulation between the hemispheres than previously theorized, with potential implications for how rTMS for MDD may be delivered and optimized in the near future. This review will catalog the range of measurement modalities that have been used to explore and describe hemispheric differences, and highlight evidence that updates and advances knowledge of TMS targeting and parameter selection. Future directions for research are proposed that may advance precision medicine and improve efficacy of TMS for MDD.


2006 ◽  
Vol 18 (6) ◽  
pp. 1018-1028 ◽  
Author(s):  
Guillaume Thierry ◽  
Cathy J. Price

Functional neuroimaging has highlighted a left-hemisphere conceptual system shared by verbal and nonverbal processing despite neuropsychological evidence that the ability to recognize verbal and nonverbal stimuli can doubly dissociate in patients with left- and right-hemisphere lesions, respectively. Previous attempts to control for perceptual differences between verbal and nonverbal stimuli in functional neuroimaging studies may have hidden differences arising at the conceptual level. Here we used a different approach and controlled for perceptual confounds by looking for amodal verbal and nonverbal conceptual activations that are common to both the visual and auditory modalities. In addition to the left-hemisphere conceptual system activated by all meaningful stimuli, we observed the left/right double dissociation in verbal and nonverbal conceptual processing, predicted by neuropsychological studies. Left middle and superior temporal regions were selectively more involved in comprehending words—heard or read—and the right midfusiform and right posterior middle temporal cortex were selectively more involved in making sense of environmental sounds and images. Thus, the neuroanatomical basis of a verbal/nonverbal conceptual processing dissociation is established.


2002 ◽  
Vol 94 (3_suppl) ◽  
pp. 1292-1300 ◽  
Author(s):  
Naoki Shibahara ◽  
Brennis Lucero-Wagoner

The present experiments investigated hemispheric differences in the brain in accessing concrete and abstract word meanings. For this purpose, an automatic semantic priming paradigm was used with a short stimulus onset asynchrony between prime and target (250 msec.) as well as a low proportion of related trials. (20%). Analysis showed that for concrete nouns, priming effects were observed in both hemispheres. There was greater priming in the right hemisphere, suggesting hemispheric differences in accessing semantic representations of concrete nouns. For abstract nouns, on the other hand, priming patterns in the right hemisphere were identical to those in the left hemisphere, suggesting that information about abstract nouns projected to the right hemisphere may be transferred to the dominant left hemisphere for further processing.


1991 ◽  
Vol 3 (4) ◽  
pp. 313-321 ◽  
Author(s):  
Atsuko Nakagawa

The role of the left and right hemisphere was examined during semantic priming by antonyms, remote associates, and unrelated words. Targets presented directly to the left hemisphere showed an early facilitation and a late developing inhibition, while targets presented directly to the right hemisphere showed a late developing facilitation of strong and weak associations and little evidence of inhibition. When a visual cue was given prior to each target word, reaction times were facilitated equally in both visual fields and for all prime target relationships. When the priming task was combined with shadowing, reaction times generally increased and all evidence of inhibition in left hemisphere processing disappeared. This supported the idea that the inhibition found in the left hemisphere was due to its interaction with the anterior attention network.


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