Monocular eye patching modulates reorienting of covert attention in patients with unilateral middle cerebral artery stroke.

Unilateral brain lesions can lead to impaired contralesional attention and reduced ipsilesional and enhanced contralesional superior colliculus (SC) activity. We aimed to investigate whether modulation of SC activation via monocular eye patching can improve contralesional attention. Twenty left-hemispheric (LH) and 20 right-hemispheric (RH) patients with an acute or subacute middle cerebral artery (MCA) stroke completed an endogenous version of the Posner cueing task twice, while the left or right eye was covered with an eye patch.