The visual system is extremely efficient at detecting events across time even at very fast presentation rates; however, dis- criminating the identity of those events is much slower and requires attention over time, a mechanism with a much coarser resolution [Cavanagh, P., Battelli, L., & Holcombe, A. O. Dynamic attention. In A. C. Nobre & S. Kastner (Eds.), The Oxford hand- book of attention (pp. 652–675). Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013]. Patients affected by right parietal lesion, including the TPJ, are severely impaired in discriminating events across time in both visual fields [Battelli, L., Cavanagh, P., & Thornton, I. M. Perception of biological motion in parietal patients. Neuro- psychologia, 41, 1808–1816, 2003]. One way to test this ability is to use a simultaneity judgment task, whereby participants are asked to indicate whether two events occurred simultaneously or not. We psychophysically varied the frequency rate of four flickering disks, and on most of the trials, one disk (either in INTRODUCTION Time processing is a crucial dimension of our lives. It is at the basis of high-order cognitive functions such as verbal communication, comprehension, and motor coor- dination, and the ability to precisely process time in the visual domain is important for many daily activities such as driving a car or walking and avoiding obstacles. Analysis of time can be done over multiple timescales, from milliseconds to seconds and minutes (Buhusi & Meck, 2005). Here, we investigate “relative timing” defined as the ordinal relationship between events (i.e., the ability to perceive the sequential order of two events; Aghdaee, Battelli, & Assad, 2014), rather than the time interval between events. We can behaviorally measure the temporal resolution of relative timing through the speed at which people can discriminate individual objects presented in a rapidly changing stream. The ability to discriminate events across the left or right visual field) was flickering out-of-phase relative to the others. We asked participants to report whether two left- or-right-presented disks were simultaneous or not. We tested a total of 23 right and left parietal lesion patients in Experiment 1, and only right parietal patients showed impairment in both visual fields while their low-level visual functions were normal. Importantly, to causally link the right TPJ to the relative timing processing, we ran a TMS experiment on healthy participants. Participants underwent three stimulation sessions and per- formed the same simultaneity judgment task before and after 20 min of low-frequency inhibitory TMS over right TPJ, left TPJ, or early visual area as a control. rTMS over the right TPJ caused a bilateral impairment in the simultaneity judgment task, whereas rTMS over left TPJ or over early visual area did not affect performance. Altogether, our results directly link the right TPJ to the processing of relative time.

The pivotal role of the right parietal lobe in temporal attention / Agosta, Sara; Magnago, Denise; Tyler, Sarah; Grossman, Emily; Galante, Emanuela; Ferraro, Francesco; Mazzini, Nunzia; Miceli, Gabriele; Battelli, Lorella. - In: JOURNAL OF COGNITIVE NEUROSCIENCE. - ISSN 0898-929X. - ELETTRONICO. - 29:5(2017), pp. 805-815. [10.1162/jocn_a_01086]

The pivotal role of the right parietal lobe in temporal attention

Miceli, Gabriele;
2017-01-01

Abstract

The visual system is extremely efficient at detecting events across time even at very fast presentation rates; however, dis- criminating the identity of those events is much slower and requires attention over time, a mechanism with a much coarser resolution [Cavanagh, P., Battelli, L., & Holcombe, A. O. Dynamic attention. In A. C. Nobre & S. Kastner (Eds.), The Oxford hand- book of attention (pp. 652–675). Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013]. Patients affected by right parietal lesion, including the TPJ, are severely impaired in discriminating events across time in both visual fields [Battelli, L., Cavanagh, P., & Thornton, I. M. Perception of biological motion in parietal patients. Neuro- psychologia, 41, 1808–1816, 2003]. One way to test this ability is to use a simultaneity judgment task, whereby participants are asked to indicate whether two events occurred simultaneously or not. We psychophysically varied the frequency rate of four flickering disks, and on most of the trials, one disk (either in INTRODUCTION Time processing is a crucial dimension of our lives. It is at the basis of high-order cognitive functions such as verbal communication, comprehension, and motor coor- dination, and the ability to precisely process time in the visual domain is important for many daily activities such as driving a car or walking and avoiding obstacles. Analysis of time can be done over multiple timescales, from milliseconds to seconds and minutes (Buhusi & Meck, 2005). Here, we investigate “relative timing” defined as the ordinal relationship between events (i.e., the ability to perceive the sequential order of two events; Aghdaee, Battelli, & Assad, 2014), rather than the time interval between events. We can behaviorally measure the temporal resolution of relative timing through the speed at which people can discriminate individual objects presented in a rapidly changing stream. The ability to discriminate events across the left or right visual field) was flickering out-of-phase relative to the others. We asked participants to report whether two left- or-right-presented disks were simultaneous or not. We tested a total of 23 right and left parietal lesion patients in Experiment 1, and only right parietal patients showed impairment in both visual fields while their low-level visual functions were normal. Importantly, to causally link the right TPJ to the relative timing processing, we ran a TMS experiment on healthy participants. Participants underwent three stimulation sessions and per- formed the same simultaneity judgment task before and after 20 min of low-frequency inhibitory TMS over right TPJ, left TPJ, or early visual area as a control. rTMS over the right TPJ caused a bilateral impairment in the simultaneity judgment task, whereas rTMS over left TPJ or over early visual area did not affect performance. Altogether, our results directly link the right TPJ to the processing of relative time.
2017
5
Agosta, Sara; Magnago, Denise; Tyler, Sarah; Grossman, Emily; Galante, Emanuela; Ferraro, Francesco; Mazzini, Nunzia; Miceli, Gabriele; Battelli, Lorella
The pivotal role of the right parietal lobe in temporal attention / Agosta, Sara; Magnago, Denise; Tyler, Sarah; Grossman, Emily; Galante, Emanuela; Ferraro, Francesco; Mazzini, Nunzia; Miceli, Gabriele; Battelli, Lorella. - In: JOURNAL OF COGNITIVE NEUROSCIENCE. - ISSN 0898-929X. - ELETTRONICO. - 29:5(2017), pp. 805-815. [10.1162/jocn_a_01086]
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Utilizza questo identificativo per citare o creare un link a questo documento: https://hdl.handle.net/11572/177354
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