Expectation-based attentional modulation of visual extinction in spatial neglect

Visual extinction, the failure of patients with unilateral focal brain damage to report the contralesional of two simultaneously presented stimuli, may be modulated by characteristics of the display such as similarity, collinearity, or connectedness. Since these factors affect the perceptual configuration of stimuli, the modulation of extinction is believed to reflect low-level perceptual grouping. In the present study, patient AG did not show any modulation of contralesional detection when the ipsilesional and contralesional stimulus grouped by colour, by form, or both (Experiment 1). In contrast, identification of the contralesional stimulus was facilitated when the stimuli grouped (Experiment 2), suggesting a modulation of extinction by specific task demands. Experiment 3 used a cueing procedure to demonstrate modulation of extinction by expectation biases. Prior to stimulus presentation, AG was cued to attend to a particular feature (e.g. colour). After stimulus exposure he was prompted to identify the expected feature on valid trials and the unexpected feature on invalid trials. AG showed a significant validity effect for contralesional stimuli i.e. he identified the expected feature (e.g. colour) significantly better than the unexpected feature (e.g. form). These results suggest that competition for selection between visual stimuli may not only be influenced by perceptual characteristics of the display, but also by high-level factors such as the response criterion or expectation biases.