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Exogenous orienting of attention in hearing: a virtual reality paradigm to assess auditory attention in neglect patients

Experimental Brain Research volume 234, pages 2893–2903 (2016)Cite this article

Abstract

While mechanisms of orienting attention in unilateral spatial neglect (USN) have frequently been studied in the visual domain, these mechanisms remain relatively unexplored in the auditory domain. Our first goal was to replicate Spence and Driver’s (J Exp Psychol Hum 22:1005–1030, 1994) results with a virtual reality paradigm. This paradigm simulated a 3-dimensional auditory space with headphones. Our second aim was to study auditory profiles of orienting attention in USN. In a first experiment, 18 healthy participants performed an auditory cueing spatial paradigm (either a target-detection task or a target-lateralization task). In a second experiment, 14 right-stroke patients (10 with USN and 4 without USN) performed these two same tasks. As in Spence and Driver’s (J Exp Psychol Hum 22:1005–1030, 1994), our first experiment showed that spatial representations are not utilized for the detection of auditory stimuli. However, during the lateralization task, participants were quicker to detect targets preceded by a spatially congruent cue, which suggests that our paradigm could be suitable for studying orienting attention in hearing. Our second experiment found that patients with USN also needed an explicit spatial task to be sensitive to auditory spatial cueing. In the target-lateralization task, they showed effects lateralized only to one side of space, whereas patients without USN did not. Although our paradigm needs replications to better understand orienting attention impairments in hearing in USN, this study could have implications for the development of clinical tasks that could assess auditory spatial attention in USN syndrome.

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Acknowledgments

This work is supported by a grant from “Métropole Européenne de Lille – MEL”

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Affiliations

  1. Axe “Neuropsychologie, Audition, Cognition, Action” (NACA), Laboratoire “Psychologie: Interactions, Temps, Emotions, Cognition” (PSITEC), UFR de Psychologie, Université Charles de Gaulle Lille 3, EA 4072, Université Lille Nord de France, BP 60 149, 59 653, Villeneuve d’Ascq, France

    Alma Guilbert, Sylvain Clément & Christine Moroni

  2. Centre de rééducation l’Espoir, Lille-Hellemmes, France

    Yves Martin

  3. Centre de rééducation Sainte Barbe, Fouquières-Lez-Lens, France

    Alexia Feuillet

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  1. Alma Guilbert
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  2. Sylvain Clément
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  3. Yves Martin
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  4. Alexia Feuillet
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  5. Christine Moroni
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Correspondence to Alma Guilbert.

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The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

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Guilbert, A., Clément, S., Martin, Y. et al. Exogenous orienting of attention in hearing: a virtual reality paradigm to assess auditory attention in neglect patients. Exp Brain Res 234, 2893–2903 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00221-016-4691-8

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00221-016-4691-8

Keywords

  • Spatial attention
  • Hearing
  • Exogenous orienting
  • Unilateral spatial neglect