scholarly journals The reliability of pseudoneglect is task dependent

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alexandra Grace Mitchell ◽  
Julie M Harris ◽  
Sarah Benstock ◽  
Justin Ales

Bisection tasks that require individuals to identify the midpoint of a line are often used to assess the presence of biases to spatial attention in both healthy and patient populations. These tasks have helped to uncover a phenomenon called pseudoneglect, a bias towards the left-side of space in healthy individuals. First identified in the tactile domain, pseudoneglect has been subsequently demonstrated in other sensory modalities such as vision. Despite this, the specific reliability of pseudoneglect within individuals across tasks and time has been investigated very little. In this study, we investigated the reliability of response bias within individuals across four separate testing sessions and during three line bisection tasks: landmark, line bisection and tactile rod bisection. Strong reliability was expected within individuals across task and session. Pseudoneglect was found when response bias was averaged across all tasks, for the entire sample. However, individual data showed biases to both left and right, with some participants showing no clear bias, demonstrating individual differences in bias. Significant, cross-session within-individual reliability was found for the landmark and tactile rod bisection tasks respectively, but no significant reliability was observed for the line bisection task. Alongside this, no significant cross-task within-individual reliability was observed. These results highlight the inconsistent nature of pseudoneglect within individuals, particularly across sensory modality. They also provide strong support for the use of the landmark task as the most reliable measure of pseudoneglect.

2017 ◽  
Vol 70 (10) ◽  
pp. 1973-1983 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sophie Antoine ◽  
Mariagrazia Ranzini ◽  
Titia Gebuis ◽  
Jean-Philippe van Dijck ◽  
Wim Gevers

A largely substantiated view in the domain of working memory is that the maintenance of serial order is achieved by generating associations of each item with an independent representation of its position, so-called position markers. Recent studies reported that the ordinal position of an item in verbal working memory interacts with spatial processing. This suggests that position markers might be spatial in nature. However, these interactions were so far observed in tasks implying a clear binary categorization of space (i.e., with left and right responses or targets). Such binary categorizations leave room for alternative interpretations, such as congruency between non-spatial categorical codes for ordinal position (e.g., begin and end) and spatial categorical codes for response (e.g., left and right). Here we discard this interpretation by providing evidence that this interaction can also be observed in a task that draws upon a continuous processing of space, the line bisection task. Specifically, bisections are modulated by ordinal position in verbal working memory, with lines bisected more towards the right after retrieving items from the end compared to the beginning of the memorized sequence. This supports the idea that position markers are intrinsically spatial in nature.


2009 ◽  
Vol 36 (S 02) ◽  
Author(s):  
B Machner ◽  
A Sprenger ◽  
U Hansen ◽  
W Heide ◽  
C Helmchen

2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (3) ◽  
pp. 376
Author(s):  
Carmelo Mario Vicario ◽  
Gabriella Martino ◽  
Alex Marcuzzo ◽  
Giuseppe Craparo

Neuroscience research links alexithymia, the difficulty in identifying and describing feelings and emotions, with left hemisphere dominance and/or right hemisphere deficit. To provide behavioral evidence for this neuroscientific hypothesis, we explored the relationship between alexithymia and performance in a line bisection task, a standard method for evaluating visuospatial processing in relation to right hemisphere functioning. We enrolled 222 healthy participants who completed a version of the 20-item Toronto Alexithymia Scale (TAS-20), which measures alexithymia, and were asked to mark (bisect) the center of a 10-cm horizontal segment. The results document a significant rightward shift in the center of the line in participants with borderline and manifest alexithymia compared with non-alexithymic individuals. The higher the TAS-20 score, the greater the rightward shift in the line bisection task. This finding supports the right hemisphere deficit hypothesis in alexithymia and suggests that visuospatial abnormalities may be an important component of this mental condition.


2021 ◽  
pp. 214-220
Author(s):  
Wei Lin Toh ◽  
Neil Thomas ◽  
Susan L. Rossell

There has been burgeoning interest in studying hallucinations in psychosis occurring across multiple sensory modalities. The current study aimed to characterize the auditory hallucination and delusion profiles in patients with auditory hallucinations only versus those with multisensory hallucinations. Participants with psychosis were partitioned into groups with voices only (AVH; <i>n</i> = 50) versus voices plus hallucinations in at least one other sensory modality (AVH+; <i>n</i> = 50), based on their responses on the Scale for the Assessment of Positive Symptoms (SAPS). Basic demographic and clinical information was collected, and the Questionnaire for Psychotic Experiences (QPE) was used to assess psychosis phenomenology. Relative to the AVH group, greater compliance to perceived commands, auditory illusions, and sensed presences was significantly elevated in the AVH+ group. The latter group also had greater levels of delusion-related distress and functional impairment and was more likely to endorse delusions of reference and misidentification. This preliminary study uncovered important phenomenological differences in those with multisensory hallucinations. Future hallucination research extending beyond the auditory modality is needed.


Author(s):  
Gemma Learmonth ◽  
Marietta Papadatou-Pastou

AbstractYoung adults exhibit a small asymmetry of visuospatial attention that favours the left side of space relative to the right (pseudoneglect). However, it remains unclear whether this leftward bias is maintained, eliminated or shifted rightward in older age. Here we present two meta-analyses that aimed to identify whether adults aged ≥50 years old display a group-level spatial attention bias, as indexed by the line bisection and the landmark tasks. A total of 69 datasets from 65 studies, involving 1654 participants, were analysed. In the meta-analysis of the line bisection task (n = 63), no bias was identified for studies where the mean age was ≥50, but there was a clear leftward bias in a subset where all individual participants were aged ≥50. There was no moderating effect of the participant’s age or sex, line length, line position, nor the presence of left or right cues. There was a small publication bias in favour of reporting rightward biases. Of note, biases were slightly more leftward in studies where participants had been recruited as part of a stand-alone older group, compared to studies where participants were recruited as controls for a clinical study. Similarly, no spatial bias was observed in the meta-analysis of the landmark task, although the number of studies included was small (n = 6). Overall, these results indicate that over 50s maintain a group-level leftward bias on the line bisection task, but more studies are needed to determine whether this bias can be modulated by stimulus- or state-dependent factors.


2014 ◽  
Vol 232 (4) ◽  
pp. 1327-1334 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sergio Chieffi ◽  
Tina Iachini ◽  
Alessandro Iavarone ◽  
Giovanni Messina ◽  
Andrea Viggiano ◽  
...  

2009 ◽  
Vol 256 (2) ◽  
pp. 289-290 ◽  
Author(s):  
B. Machner ◽  
A. Sprenger ◽  
U. Hansen ◽  
W. Heide ◽  
C. Helmchen

2016 ◽  
Vol 14 (3) ◽  
pp. 21-31 ◽  
Author(s):  
O.B. Bogdashina

Synaesthesia — a phenomenon of perception, when stimulation of one sensory modality triggers a perception in one or more other sensory modalities. Synaesthesia is not uniform and can manifest itself in different ways. As the sensations and their interpretation vary in different periods of time, it makes it hard to study this phenom¬enon. The article presents the classification of different forms of synaesthesia, including sensory and cognitive; and bimodal and multimodal synaesthesia. Some synaesthetes have several forms and variants of synaesthesia, while others – just one form of it. Although synaesthesia is not specific to autism spectrum disorders, it is quite common among autistic individuals. The article deals with the most common forms of synaesthesia in autism, advantages and problems of synesthetic perception in children with autism spectrum disorders, and provides some advice to parents how to recognise synaesthesia in children with autism.


Author(s):  
Drew McRacken ◽  
Maddie Dyson ◽  
Kevin Hu

Over the past few decades, there has been a significant number of reports that suggested that reaction times for different sensory modalities were different – e.g., that visual reaction time was slower than tactile reaction time. A recent report by Holden and colleagues stated that (1) there has been a significant historic upward drift in reaction times reported in the literature, (2) that this drift or degradation in reaction times could be accounted for by inaccuracies in the methods used and (3) that these inaccurate methods led to inaccurate reporting of differences between visual and tactile based reaction time testing.  The Holden study utilized robotics (i.e., no human factors) to test visual and tactile reaction time methods but did not assess how individuals would perform on different sensory modalities.  This study utilized three different sensory modalities: visual, auditory, and tactile, to test reaction time. By changing the way in which the subjects were prompted and measuring subsequent reaction time, the impact of sensory modality could be analyzed. Reaction time testing for two sensory modalities, auditory and visual, were administered through an Arduino Uno microcontroller device, while tactile-based reaction time testing was administered with the Brain Gauge. A range of stimulus intensities was delivered for the reaction times delivered by each sensory modality. The average reaction time and reaction time variability was assessed and a trend could be identified for the reaction time measurements of each of the sensory modalities. Switching the sensory modality did not result in a difference in reaction time and it was concluded that this was due to the implementation of accurate circuitry used to deliver each test. Increasing stimulus intensity for each sensory modality resulted in faster reaction times. The results of this study confirm the findings of Holden and colleagues and contradict the results reported in countless studies that conclude that (1) reaction times are historically slower now than they were 50 years ago and (2) that there are differences in reaction times for different sensory modalities (vision, hearing, tactile). The implications of this are that utilization of accurate reaction time methods could have a significant impact on clinical outcomes and that many methods in current clinical use are basically perpetuating poor methods and wasting time and money of countless subjects or patients.


Author(s):  
Pere M. Parés-Casanova

Organisms can develop different kinds of asymmetry when deviations from expected perfect symmetry occur. Among others are fluctuating asymmetry (FA) and directional asymmetry (DA). FA represents small random differences between corresponding parts on the left and right sides of an individual in bilaterally paired structures. It is thought that FA reflects an organism’s ability to cope with genetic and environmental stress during growth. DA occurs whenever one side on the plane of symmetry develops more than the other side, and has a genetic component. In this research, we examined the expression of morphological symmetry in 38 skulls of different age groups of wild boar (Sus scrofa), on their ventral aspect, using two-dimensional coordinates of 27 landmarks. Analyses showed the presence of significant FA and DA in the entire sample, detecting also distinctive differences between age groups. The obtained results show that the shape differences in different age groups could reasonably be a consequence of a response to environmental factors for FA and a masticatory lateralization for DA.


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