the effect of stimulus duration and motor response in hemispatial neglect during a visual search task刺激持续时间和运动反应的影响在hemispatial忽视一个视觉搜索任务.pdfVIP

The Effect of Stimulus Duration and Motor Response in Hemispatial Neglect during a Visual Search Task Laura M. Jelsone-Swain*¤a, David V. Smith¤b, Gordon C. Baylis¤c Department of Psychology, University of South Carolina, Columbia, South Carolina, United States of America Abstract Patients with hemispatial neglect exhibit a myriad of profound deficits. A hallmark of this syndrome is the patients’ absence of awareness of items located in their contralesional space. Many studies, however, have demonstrated that neglect patients exhibit some level of processing of these neglected items. It has been suggested that unconscious processing of neglected information may manifest as a fast denial. This theory of fast denial proposes that neglected stimuli are detected in the same way as non-neglected stimuli, but without overt awareness. We evaluated the fast denial theory by conducting two separate visual search task experiments, each differing by the duration of stimulus presentation. Specifically, in Experiment 1 each stimulus remained in the participants’ visual field until a response was made. In Experiment 2 each stimulus was presented for only a brief duration. We further evaluated the fast denial theory by comparing verbal to motor task responses in each experiment. Overall, our results from both experiments and tasks showed no evidence for the presence of implicit knowledge of neglected stimuli. Instead, patients with neglect responded the same when they neglected stimuli as when they correctly reported stimulus absence. These findings thus cast doubt on the concept of the fast denial theory and its consequent implications for non-conscious processing. Importantly, our study demonstrated that the only behavior affected was during conscious detection of ipsilesional sti