Evidence for abnormal visuospatial attentional processes in the interictal migraineur

ABSTRACT

Research shows decreased brain region activity in the right temporo-parietal junction (rTPJ) in people with migraine headache relative to headache-free controls when performing an orienting visuospatial attention task. Functional inactivation of the rTPJ has been associated with rightward performance deviations on laterality-based attention Landmark (LM) and greyscale (GRE) tasks in individuals with unilateral neglect and heightened activation in the rTPJ is associated with leftward deviation, known as pseudoneglect, in controls on these tasks. Given this, we investigated whether migraineurs would lack the leftward deviation found in headache-free controls on visuospatial attention tasks. 36 migraineurs and 38 controls were presented with LM and GRE tasks. Response bias scores showed a significant difference in responses between groups (p = 0.036) on the GRE, a luminance-based task, but not on the LM, a size-based task (p = 0.826). This study is the first to show laterality-based attentional differences in migraineurs, as compared to controls. Specifically, migraineurs were found to have smaller leftward biases on luminance-based visuospatial attention tasks, as compared to controls, aligning with previous research suggesting that migraine may be having an impact on a variety of attention tasks in migraineurs in between headache attacks.

KEYWORDS:

• Migraine
• headache
• attention
• laterality

Acknowledgements

This research was funded by NSERC. Reprints requests should be sent to Marla J. S. Mickleborough, Department of Psychology, College of Arts & Science, University of Saskatchewan, 9 Campus Drive, Saskatoon, SK, Canada S7N 5A5, or via email: [email protected]

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

The data that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author, [MJSM], upon reasonable request.

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC) of Canada in the form of an NSERC Discovery Grant to the senior author M. Mickleborough (RGPIN-2016-05811) and an NSERC Undergraduate Student Research Award to lead author C. Kriegler and secondary author G. Sun.