Abnormal inhibition of return: A review and new data on patients with parietal lobe damage

Abstract

The study of the performance of patients with neurological disorders has been fruitful in revealing the nature and neural basis of inhibition of return (IOR). Thus, in recent years, studies have reported abnormal IOR in patients with Alzheimer's disease, patients diagnosed with schizophrenia, and brain-damaged patients. In the present study, we investigated the hypothesis that a spatial “disengagement deficit” (DD; Posner, Walker, Friedrich, & Rafal, 1984) contributed to the pattern of impaired IOR in the ipsilesional field of parietal patients, found in a previous work (Vivas, Humphreys, & Fuentes, 2003). In a first experiment, we replicated the attenuation of IOR for ipsilesional targets on those trials with a lateralized IOR procedure. With stimuli vertically aligned about fixation, we found intact IOR for both up and down targets. Most important, when we ameliorated the potential impact of a spatial DD by presenting both cues and target in the same hemifield, still we found impaired IOR in the ipsilesional field. We interpret these findings in terms of unilateral parietal damage leading to an imbalance of the relative salience of signals represented in a spatial map for directing attention.

Acknowledgments

We thank the patients for their time in taking part. Also, we are grateful to Fenia Kalegoropoulou for her assistance in collecting data. The work was supported by grants from the BBSRC, the EPSRC, the MRC, and the Stroke Association (UK).

Notes

¹ Note that this DD, which is related to automatic and exogenous control of attention, differs from the deficit in intrinsic spontaneous shift of attention that has been attributed to AD and schizophrenia.

² Note that although all the events (cues and targets) are now presented only in one visual hemifield, there is still competition from the placeholder boxes in the opposite field.

³ However, see Cohen, Romero, Farah, and Servan-Schreiber (1994) for a simulation of the extinction-like RT pattern using a model of attention based on competitive interactions that do not require a “disengagement” operation.