Prism adaptation alters electrophysiological markers of attentional processes in the healthy brain

Abstract

Neglect patients typically show a rightward attentional orienting bias and a strong disengagement deficit, such that they are especially slow in responding to left-sided targets after right-sided cues (Posner et al., 1984). Prism adaptation (PA) can reduce diverse debilitating neglect symptoms and it has been hypothesized that PA’s effects are so generalized that they might be mediated by attentional mechanisms (Pisella et al., 2006; Redding and Wallace, 2006). In neglect patients, performance on spatial attention tasks improves after rightward-deviatingPA(Jacquin-Courtois et al., 2013). In contrast, in healthy subjects, although there is evidence that leftward-deviating PA induces neglect-like performance on some visuospatial tasks, behavioral studies of spatial attention tasks have mostly yielded negative results (Morris et al., 2004; Bultitude et al., 2013). We hypothesized that these negative behavioral findings might reflect the limitations of behavioral measures in healthy subjects. Here we exploited the sensitivity of event-related potentials to test the hypothesis that electrophysiological markers of attentional processes in the healthy human brain are affected by PA. Leftward-deviating PA generated asymmetries in attentional orienting (reflected in the cue-locked N1) and in attentional disengagement for invalidly cued left targets (reflected in the target-locked P1). This is the first electrophysiological demonstration that leftward-deviating PA in healthy subjects mimics attentional patterns typically seen in neglect patients.