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Abstract:
Adaptive-evolutionary arguments and empirical evidence
suggest that emotional significance of stimuli might prioritize the
allocation of spatial attention to potentially relevant stimuli. We
asked whether such effects might still occur in patients with
unilateral neglect and visual extinction who usually remain unaware
of contralesional stimuli when these compete with concurrent
ipsilesional stimuli. Two experiments were performed in three
patients who had right parietal damage and left visual extinction,
but intact fields on both sides. In a first experiment, shapes or
faces with either neutral, happy, or angry expressions were
presented in right, left, or both visual fields. On bilateral
trials, parietal patients extinguished faces on the contralesional
side much less often than shapes, and faces with happy or angry
facial expressions much less than neutral faces. In a second
experiment, pictures of spiders or flowers made of similar
low-level features were presented in right, left, or both fields.
Again, parietal patients were more likely to perceive emotional
stimuli (spiders) than other similar but neutral pictures
(flowers). We suggest that in patients with neglect in whom
mechanisms of spatial attention are impaired after parietal damage,
intact visual pathways to the ventral temporal lobe and amygdala
could still mediate mechanisms of "emotional attention".
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