Cattaneo Zaira, Lega Carlotta, Vecchi Tomaso, Vallar Giuseppe
Department of Psychology, University of Milano-Bicocca, Milan, Italy.
Perception. 2012;41(11):1395-8. doi: 10.1068/p7355.
Neurologically intact individuals usually show a leftward bias in line bisection, a tendency known as "pseudoneglect", likely reflecting a right-hemisphere dominance in controlling the allocation of spatial attention. Studies in brain-damaged patients with left visuospatial neglect have reported that auditory stimulation may reduce the deficit, both in a spatially dependent and in a spatially independent way. Here we show for the first time that the concurrent binaural presentation of auditory white noise affects healthy individuals' performance in both visual and haptic bisection, reducing their leftward error. We suggest that this effect depends on the noise boosting alertness and restoring the hemispheric activation balance. Our data clearly show that task-irrelevant auditory noise crossmodally affects the allocation of spatial resources in both the haptic and the visual space; future research may clarify whether these effects are specific for the type of auditory stimulation.
神经系统完好的个体在直线二等分任务中通常表现出向左的偏差，这种倾向被称为“假性忽视”，可能反映了右半球在控制空间注意力分配方面的主导地位。对患有左侧视觉空间忽视的脑损伤患者的研究报告称，听觉刺激可能会以空间依赖和空间独立的方式减少这种缺陷。在这里，我们首次表明，同时双耳呈现听觉白噪声会影响健康个体在视觉和触觉二等分任务中的表现，减少他们的向左误差。我们认为这种效应取决于噪声提高警觉性并恢复半球激活平衡。我们的数据清楚地表明，与任务无关的听觉噪声会跨模态影响触觉和视觉空间中空间资源的分配；未来的研究可能会阐明这些效应是否特定于听觉刺激的类型。
