Barrett Anna M, Craver-Lemley Catherine E
Kessler Medical Rehabilitation Research and Education Center, West Orange, New Jersey 07052, USA.
J Int Neuropsychol Soc. 2008 Jul;14(4):562-70. doi: 10.1017/S1355617708080764.
Healthy subjects demonstrate leftward bias on visual-spatial tasks. However, young controls may also be left-biased when drawing communicatively, depicting the subject of a sentence leftward on a page relative to the sentence object, that is, a spatial-syntactic, implicit task. A leftward visual-spatial bias may decrease with aging, as right-hemisphere, dorsal, visual-spatial activation may be reduced in elderly subjects performing these tasks. We compared horizontal and radial (near-far) visual spatial bias, and spatial-syntactic bias, in healthy young and aged participants. Both horizontal and radial visual-spatial bias were smaller in aged participants when explicitly, but not implicitly assessed. Mean implicit far bias was greater in aged subjects, although this varied by task. We observed less implicit, spatial-syntactic left bias in aged than young participants. These results may be consistent with relatively less dominance of right hemisphere, dorsal spatial systems with aging.
健康受试者在视觉空间任务中表现出向左偏向。然而，年轻对照组在进行交流性绘图时也可能存在向左偏向，即在页面上相对于句子宾语将句子主语绘制在左侧，这是一种空间句法的隐性任务。随着年龄增长，向左的视觉空间偏向可能会减小，因为在执行这些任务的老年受试者中，右半球背侧视觉空间激活可能会减少。我们比较了健康年轻和老年参与者的水平和径向（近-远）视觉空间偏向以及空间句法偏向。在明确评估而非隐性评估时，老年参与者的水平和径向视觉空间偏向均较小。老年受试者的平均隐性远偏向更大，尽管这因任务而异。我们观察到，与年轻参与者相比，老年参与者的隐性空间句法向左偏向较少。这些结果可能与随着年龄增长右半球背侧空间系统的相对主导性降低相一致。
