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Cerebral Cortex Advance Access published online on September 1, 2004

Cerebral Cortex, doi:10.1093/cercor/bhh164
© 2004 by Oxford University Press
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Article

Dorsal Posterior Parietal rTMS Affects Voluntary Orienting of Visuospatial Attention

Gregor Thut 1, Annika Nietzel 2, Alvaro Pascual-Leone 3*

1 Center for Non-invasive Brain Stimulation, Harvard Medical School and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Boston, MA, USA; Functional Brain Mapping Laboratory, Department of Neurology, University Hospital Geneva, Switzerland
2 Center for Non-invasive Brain Stimulation, Harvard Medical School and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Boston, MA, USA; Neurology Department, Charité, Humboldt University, Berlin, Germany
3 Center for Non-invasive Brain Stimulation, Harvard Medical School and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Boston, MA, USA; Institut Guttman, Barcelona, Spain

* To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: apleone{at}bidmc.harvard.edu.


   Abstract

Patients with lesions in posterior parietal cortex (PPC) are relatively unimpaired in voluntarily directing visual attention to different spatial locations, while many neuroimaging studies in healthy subjects suggest dorsal PPC involvement in this function. We used an offline repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) protocol to study this issue further. Ten healthy participants performed a cue-target paradigm. Cues prompted covert orienting of spatial attention under voluntary control to either a left or right visual field position. Targets were flashed subsequently at the cued or uncued location, or bilaterally. Following rTMS over right dorsal PPC, (i) the benefit for target detection at cued versus uncued positions was preserved irrespective of cueing direction (left- or rightward), but (ii) leftward cueing was associated with a global impairment in target detection, at all target locations. This reveals that leftward orienting was still possible after right dorsal PPC stimulation, albeit at an increased overall cost for target detection. In addition, rTMS (iii) impaired left, but (iv) enhanced right target detection after rightward cueing. The finding of a global drop in target detection during leftward orienting with a spared, relative detection benefit at the cued (left) location (i-ii) suggests that right dorsal PPC plays a subsidiary rather than pivotal role in voluntary spatial orienting. This finding reconciles seemingly conflicting results from patients and neuroimaging studies. The finding of attentional inhibition and enhancement occurring contra- and ipsilaterally to the stimulation site (iii-iv) supports the view that spatial attention bias can be selectively modulated through rTMS, which has proven useful to transiently reduce visual hemispatial neglect.

Keywords: attention; posterior parietal cortex; rTMS; spatial disengagement; spatial orienting.
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