Control of attention by the motor system: a motor bias theory of attention
Final Report Abstract
This project aimed to examine a specific aspect of the link between action and attention, namely how the fidelity with which motor plans are translated into actions affects spatial and temporal aspects of premotor shifts of attention. We wanted to manipulate fidelity by introducing experimental motor perturbation and by studying the effect of naturally occurring movement errors in patients with movement disorders. Both approaches required the development and building of new setups that combined the tracking of limbs and eyes, with facilities for presenting visual stimuli and with a robotic device for creating force fields. The setup, to be used with patients, also needed to be mobile so that it could be transported to hospitals. Designing, developing, building and testing those setups took up a large portion of the project’s duration. In addition we also struggled to replicate some basic findings in the literature and were thus encouraged to develop new methods for probing attention in an action context. In the meantime both setups are completed and have been successfully employed to carry out a number of experiments. We could establish that penalizing eye-movements leads to a stable shift of focus to the non-penalized hemispace – a finding that has the potential to improve the clinical condition of unilateral neglect. We developed a new attentional task that is based on the prior-entry phenomena, is reliably affected by pre-saccadic shifts of attention, requires little training and shows little intersubject variability. Finally we established a multi-lab collaboration to establish the optimal condition to study attention-action links.
Publications
- (2020). Gaze-contingent stimulus removal leads to subsequent changes in overt attentional allocation. Neuropsychologia, 139, 107297
Ludwig, K., Schmid, D., & Schenk, T.
(See online at https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2019.107297) - Cognitive and Motor Processes in Visuospatial Attention
Daniel T. Smith, D.T., Casteau, S., van der Stigchel, S. & Schenk, T
(See online at https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cortex.2021.06.006)
