Skip Navigation


Cerebral Cortex Advance Access originally published online on June 4, 2008
Cerebral Cortex 2009 19(2):383-387; doi:10.1093/cercor/bhn088
This Article
Right arrow Full Text Freely available
Right arrow FREE Full Text (PDF) Freely available
Right arrow All Versions of this Article:
19/2/383    most recent
bhn088v1
Right arrow Alert me when this article is cited
Right arrow Alert me if a correction is posted
Services
Right arrow Email this article to a friend
Right arrow Similar articles in this journal
Right arrow Similar articles in PubMed
Right arrow Alert me to new issues of the journal
Right arrow Add to My Personal Archive
Right arrow Download to citation manager
Right arrowRequest Permissions
Google Scholar
Right arrow Articles by Khan, A.Z.
Right arrow Articles by Pisella, L.
Right arrow Search for Related Content
PubMed
Right arrow PubMed Citation
Right arrow Articles by Khan, A.Z.
Right arrow Articles by Pisella, L.
Social Bookmarking
Add to CiteULike   Add to Connotea   Add to Del.icio.us  
What's this?

© The Author 2008. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org

Parietal Damage Dissociates Saccade Planning from Presaccadic Perceptual Facilitation

A.Z. Khan1,2, A. Blangero1, Y. Rossetti1, R. Salemme1, J. Luauté1,3, H. Deubel4, W.X. Schneider4, N. Laverdure1, G. Rode1,3, D. Boisson1,3 and L. Pisella1

1 Institut National de la Santé et de la Recherche Médicale U864, Espace et Action, Bron, France; Université Claude Bernard, Lyon 1; Institut Fédératif des Neurosciences de Lyon (IFNL), Lyon 60003, France, 2 Smith-Kettlewell Eye Research Institute, San Francisco, CA 94115, USA, 3 Hospices Civils de Lyon, Lyon 60003, France, 4 Department of Psychology, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität, Munich 80333, Germany, 5 Neuro-Cognitive Psychology, Bielefeld University, Bielefeld 33501, Germany

Address correspondence to Laure Pisella, Espace et Action—Inserm 864, Bron, Rhone-Alpes, France. Email: laure.pisella{at}inserm.fr.

A well-known theory in the field of attention today is the premotor theory of attention which suggests that the mechanisms involved in eye movements are the same as those for spatial attention shifts. We tested a parietal damaged patient with unilateral optic ataxia and 4 controls on a dual saccade/attentional task and show a dissociation between saccadic eye movements and presaccadic perceptual enhancement at the saccade goal. Remarkably, though the patient was able to make the appropriate saccades to the left, impaired visual field (undistinguishable from saccades to his right, intact visual field), he was unable to discriminate the letter at the saccade goal (whereas his performance was like controls for letter discrimination in his right visual field). This suggests that saccade planning and presaccadic perceptual facilitation are separable—planning a saccade to a location does not necessitate that the processing of this location is enhanced. Based on these results, we suggest that the parietal cortex is necessary for the coupling between saccade planning and presaccadic perceptual facilitation.

Key Words: attention • optic ataxia • parietal cortex • saccades


Add to CiteULike CiteULike   Add to Connotea Connotea   Add to Del.icio.us Del.icio.us    What's this?




Disclaimer: Please note that abstracts for content published before 1996 were created through digital scanning and may therefore not exactly replicate the text of the original print issues. All efforts have been made to ensure accuracy, but the Publisher will not be held responsible for any remaining inaccuracies. If you require any further clarification, please contact our Customer Services Department.