Deficit of endogenous spatial orienting of attention in children with benign epilepsy with centrotemporal spikes (BECTS)

Attention difficulties have been reported in children with benign epilepsy with centrotemporal spikes (BECTS) but have not yet been fully specified. The aim of this study was to evaluate the functions of exogenous and endogenous spatial orienting of attention and alerting in these children. Two versions of the spatial cueing paradigm and an alerting task, including trials with and without warning signal, were performed by 25 children with BECTS aged 6–12 years and 25 controls matched for age, gender and IQ. In these three tasks, patients were slower and made more omissions than controls. The alert effect amplitude was comparable in both groups at the longer SOAs (450 ms and 800 ms) while, at the shortest SOA (100 ms), it was greater in controls than in the BECTS group. In the first version of the spatial cueing task (peripheral cues and no probability information), the validity effect amplitude, measured by longer response times (RTs) in invalid trials compared to valid trials, was comparable in both groups. In the second version (central cues and a 75% probability that the target would appear at the cued location), the validity effect was larger in the BECTS group compared to controls because of a higher cost of invalid trials compared to neutral trials. These results suggest the existence of impairments in the endogenous orienting of attention in children with BECTS, in particular an attention disengagement deficit, while exogenous orienting of attention appears to be preserved.