Hemispatial neglect: Task difficulty, concentration and biases in cognition as observed in healthy subjects

Does attention affect spatial cognition?

Strokes are sometimes accompanied by the symptom of higher brain dysfunction, in addition to the symptom of limb paralysis. This is the situation where the ability to perform higher-level cognitive functions in actions that the person can ordinarily do without any trouble, such as changing clothes, behaving appropriately in appropriate situations, and paying attention to something, is damaged in a range of ways.

The type most commonly encountered in a clinical setting is known as hemispatial neglect. Hemispatial neglect affects day-to-day life in general. It is closely linked to the attention function, and because of this, it is thought to present more strongly in the case of damage to the right hemisphere, where the essence of the attention function is located, but when taking healthy subjects, ***

The paper I discuss today investigates how biases in spatial cognition change with task difficulty and concentration in healthy subjects. The study had the subjects look at letters arranged symmetrically on the left and right for a moment and then answer what letters were there.

It investigated how much bias there was in the recognition of letters between the left and right between:

1) Answering with only a glance

2) Dual tasks (auditory cognition or dual language cognition)

It is known that spatial cognition is generally biased towards the left in healthy people, and this study also shows a bias to the left initially. However, as the tasks continue, this bias towards the left gradually decreases.
The authors suggest that this decrease could be caused by lowered concentration as the monotonous tasks continue, which may have affected spatial cognition.

I wondered whether the way that hemispatial neglect patients are initially adept at walking through the ward but tend to cause incidents once they get used to it could be due to the effect of this decrease in concentration due to familiarity.

Reference URL: The effects of time-on-task and concurrent cognitive load on normal visuospatial bias.