Farah M J, Wong A B, Monheit M A, Morrow L A
Department of Psychology, Carnegie-Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA 15213.
Neuropsychologia. 1989;27(4):461-70. doi: 10.1016/0028-3932(89)90051-1.
Is the spatial attention system divided into separate, modality-specific subsystems, or is there a supramodal spatial attention system? More specifically, does the role of the parietal lobe in spatial attention involve modality-specific or supramodal mechanisms? We addressed this question using a variant of Posner's spatial cuing task. Parietal-lesioned patients performed a simple reaction time task to lateralized visual target stimuli, preceded on each trial by either non-predictive lateralized visual cue stimuli or non-predictive lateralized auditory cue stimuli. With both types of cues, we found disproportionate slowness in responding to invalidly cued contralesional targets, indicative of an impairment in disengaging attention from the ipsilesional to the contralesional side of space. The finding of an attentional disengagement impairment for visual targets with auditory cues implies that the parietal lobe's attentional mechanism operates on a representation of space in which both visual and auditory stimuli are represented, in other words, a supramodal representation of space.
空间注意系统是被划分为独立的、特定感觉模态的子系统，还是存在一个跨感觉模态的空间注意系统？更具体地说，顶叶在空间注意中的作用涉及特定感觉模态机制还是跨感觉模态机制？我们使用波斯纳空间线索任务的一个变体来解决这个问题。患有顶叶损伤的患者对侧向视觉目标刺激执行简单反应时任务，每次试验之前会出现非预测性的侧向视觉线索刺激或非预测性的侧向听觉线索刺激。对于这两种线索类型，我们发现对无效线索提示的对侧损伤目标做出反应时存在不成比例的迟缓，这表明在将注意力从同侧空间转移到对侧空间时存在障碍。对于具有听觉线索的视觉目标存在注意力转移障碍这一发现意味着，顶叶的注意力机制作用于一个同时表征视觉和听觉刺激的空间表征，换句话说，是一个跨感觉模态的空间表征。
