Ishii Daisuke, Takeda Kotaro, Yamamoto Satoshi, Noguchi Akira, Ishibashi Kiyoshige, Tanamachi Kenya, Yozu Arito, Kohno Yutaka
Center for Medical Sciences, Ibaraki Prefectural University of Health Sciences, Ami, Japan.
Department of Cognitive Behavioral Physiology, Chiba University Graduate School of Medicine, Chiba, Japan.
Front Behav Neurosci. 2019 Jan 15;13:1. doi: 10.3389/fnbeh.2019.00001. eCollection 2019.
The integration of multiple sensory modalities allows us to adapt to the environment of the outside world. It is widely known that visual stimuli interfere with the processing of auditory information, which is involved in the ability to pay attention. Additionally, visuospatial attention has the characteristic of laterality. It is unclear whether this laterality of visuospatial attention affects the processing of auditory stimuli. The sensorimotor gating system is a neurological process, which filters out unnecessary stimuli from environmental stimuli in the brain. Prepulse inhibition (PPI) is an operational measure of the sensorimotor gating system, which a weaker prestimulus (prepulse), such as a visual stimulus, inhibits the startle reflex elicited by a subsequent robust startling stimulus (pulse) such as a tone. Therefore, we investigated whether the visual stimulus from the left or right visual space affects the sensorimotor gating system in a "rest" task (low attentional condition) and a "selective attention" task (high attentional condition). In the selective attention task, we found that the target prepulse presented in the left and bilateral visual fields suppressed the startle reflex more than that presented in the right visual field. By contrast, there was no laterality of PPI in the no-target prepulse condition, and there was no laterality of PPI in the rest task. These results suggest that the laterality of visuospatial attention affects the sensorimotor gating system depending on the attentional condition. Moreover, the process of visual information processing may differ between the left and right brain.
多种感觉模态的整合使我们能够适应外部世界的环境。众所周知，视觉刺激会干扰听觉信息的处理，而听觉信息处理与注意力相关。此外，视觉空间注意具有偏侧性特征。目前尚不清楚视觉空间注意的这种偏侧性是否会影响听觉刺激的处理。感觉运动门控系统是一种神经学过程，它能从大脑中的环境刺激中滤除不必要的刺激。预脉冲抑制（PPI）是感觉运动门控系统的一种操作指标，即较弱的预刺激（预脉冲），如视觉刺激，会抑制随后由强烈的惊吓刺激（脉冲），如音调引发的惊吓反射。因此，我们研究了来自左或右视觉空间的视觉刺激在“静息”任务（低注意力条件）和“选择性注意”任务（高注意力条件）中是否会影响感觉运动门控系统。在选择性注意任务中，我们发现出现在左视野和双侧视野的目标预脉冲比出现在右视野的预脉冲更能抑制惊吓反射。相比之下，在无目标预脉冲条件下，PPI没有偏侧性，在静息任务中PPI也没有偏侧性。这些结果表明，视觉空间注意的偏侧性会根据注意力条件影响感觉运动门控系统。此外，左右脑的视觉信息处理过程可能存在差异。
