Insular Cortex Mediates Attentional Capture by Behaviorally Relevant Stimuli after Damage to the Right Temporoparietal Junction.

The right temporoparietal junction (rTPJ) and insula both play a key role for the processing of relevant stimuli. However, while both have been conceived as neural "switches" that detect salient events and redirect the focus of attention, it remains unclear how these brain regions interact to achieve this behavioral goal. Here, we tested human participants with focal left-hemispheric or right-hemispheric lesions in a spatial cuing task that requires participants to react to lateralized stimuli preceded by a distracter that shares or does not share a relevant feature with the target.

The neuroanatomy of spatial awareness: a large-scale region-of-interest and voxel-based anatomical study.

Lesion-symptom studies of spatial neglect and the attention deficits associated with this disorder draw a complex picture of the brain areas involved in spatial awareness. Several cortical regions and fiber tracts have been identified as predictors of behavioral performance, a pattern reflecting the large degree of methodological variance and modest sample sizes of many studies. Here, we examined the anatomical predictors of deficits of spatial exploration, reading and line bisection in 134 unselected stroke patients with post-acute, right-hemispheric brain injury.

Damage to the right temporoparietal junction, but not lateral prefrontal or insular cortex, amplifies the role of goal-directed attention.

Whether an object captures attention depends on the interplay between its saliency and current behavioral predispositions of the observer. Neuroimaging work has implied a ventral attention network, comprising the temporoparietal junction (TPJ), lateral prefrontal cortex (lPFC) and the insula, in attentional orienting toward salient events. Activity of the TPJ is driven by novel and unexpected objects, while the lateral prefrontal cortex is involved in stimulus-driven as well as goal-directed processing.

Neural correlates of reality filtering in schizophrenia spectrum disorder.

Background: A false sense of reality is a characteristic of schizophrenia spectrum disorders (SSD). Reality confusion may also emanate from posterior orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) lesions, as evident in confabulations that patients act upon and disorientation. This confusion can be measured by repeated runs of a continuous recognition task (CRT): patients increase their false positive rate from the second run on, failing to realize that an item is not a repetition within the current run.

Comparison of Neuroplastic Responses to Cathodal Transcranial Direct Current Stimulation and Continuous Theta Burst Stimulation in Subacute Stroke.

Objective: To investigate the effects of cathodal transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) and continuous theta burst stimulation (cTBS) on neural network connectivity and motor recovery in individuals with subacute stroke.

Design: Double-blinded, randomized, placebo-controlled study.

Setting: University hospital rehabilitation unit.

A neuroanatomical model of space-based and object-centered processing in spatial neglect.

Visual attention can be deployed in space-based or object-centered reference frames. Right-hemisphere damage may lead to distinct deficits of space- or object-based processing, and such dissociations are thought to underlie the heterogeneous nature of spatial neglect. Previous studies have suggested that object-centered processing deficits (such as in copying, reading or line bisection) result from damage to retro-rolandic regions while impaired spatial exploration reflects damage to more anterior regions.

Electrophysiological correlates of visual binding errors after bilateral parietal damage.

Illusory conjunctions (e.g. the confusion between the shape of one stimulus with the color of another stimulus) are the most dramatic expression of binding failures in vision.