Department of Psychology, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.
Cortex. 2011 Jul-Aug;47(7):787-99. doi: 10.1016/j.cortex.2010.07.005. Epub 2010 Jul 24.
Simultanagnosia is a disorder of visual attention: the inability to see more than one object at one time. Some hypothesize that this is due to a constriction of the visual "window" of attention. Little is known about how simultanagnosics explore complex stimuli and how their behaviour changes with recovery. We monitored the eye movements of simultanagnosic patient SL to see how she scans social scenes shortly after onset of simultanagnosia (Time 1) and after some recovery (Time 2). At Time 1 SL had an abnormally low proportion of fixations to the eyes of the people in the scenes. She made a significantly larger proportion of fixations to the eyes at Time 2. We hypothesized that this change was related to an expansion of her restricted window of attention. Previously we simulated SL's behaviour in healthy subjects by having them view stimuli through a restricted viewing window. We used this simulation paradigm here to test our expanding window hypothesis. Subjects viewing social scenes through a larger window allocated more fixations to the eyes of people in the scenes than subjects viewing scenes through a smaller window, supporting our hypothesis. Recovery in simultanagnosia may be related to the expansion of the restricted attentional window that characterizes the disorder.
一次无法看到一个以上的物体。一些人假设，这是由于注意力的视觉“窗口”收缩。关于同时失认症患者如何探索复杂刺激以及他们的行为如何随恢复而变化，人们知之甚少。我们监测了同时失认症患者 SL 的眼动，以了解她在同时失认症发作后不久（第 1 次时间）和恢复后（第 2 次时间）如何扫描社交场景。在第 1 次时间，SL 注视场景中人物眼睛的比例异常低。她在第 2 次时间注视眼睛的比例明显更高。我们假设这种变化与她受限的注意力窗口的扩大有关。此前，我们通过让健康受试者通过受限的观察窗口观察刺激来模拟 SL 的行为。我们在这里使用这种模拟范式来检验我们的扩展窗口假设。与通过较小窗口观察场景的受试者相比，通过较大窗口观察社交场景的受试者会将更多的注视分配给场景中的人物的眼睛，这支持了我们的假设。同时失认症的恢复可能与表征该疾病的受限注意力窗口的扩大有关。
