Rorden C, Karnath H O, Driver J
School of Psychology, University of Nottingham, Nottingham NG7 2RD, UK.
Neuropsychologia. 2001;39(4):364-75. doi: 10.1016/s0028-3932(00)00126-3.
Neck-proprioceptive and caloric-vestibular stimulation have been shown to ameliorate the spatial bias exhibited by patients suffering from unilateral visual neglect. These interventions might in principle have their effect by biasing covert attention towards the neglected side. If so, the same interventions should also modulate covert attention in neurologically-intact subjects. However, we demonstrate here that neither neck-proprioception (vibration of left neck muscles) nor caloric-vestibular stimulation (injection of iced water into the left ear) affect covert visual attention in healthy individuals. These results from normals may distinguish between different accounts for unilateral neglect in patients. In particular, they argue against explanations of neglect solely in terms of a pathological misperception of body orientation within an otherwise normal neural representation of space.
颈部本体感觉和冷热前庭刺激已被证明可改善单侧视觉忽视患者所表现出的空间偏向。这些干预原则上可能通过将隐蔽注意力偏向被忽视的一侧而产生效果。如果是这样，相同的干预也应该调节神经功能正常受试者的隐蔽注意力。然而，我们在此证明，颈部本体感觉（左侧颈部肌肉振动）和冷热前庭刺激（向左耳注入冰水）均不会影响健康个体的隐蔽视觉注意力。来自正常人的这些结果可能有助于区分对患者单侧忽视的不同解释。特别是，这些结果反对仅从在其他方面正常的空间神经表征中对身体方位的病理性错误感知来解释忽视现象。
