Adult developmental trajectories of pseudoneglect in the tactile, visual and auditory modalities and the influence of starting position and stimulus length

Abstract

Pseudoneglect is a tendency to pay more attention to the left side of space, typically demonstrated on tasks like visuo-spatial line bisection, tactile rod bisection and the mental representation of numbers. The developmental trajectory of this bias on these three tasks is not fully understood. In the current study younger participants aged between 18 and 40 years of age and older participants aged between 55 and 90 years conducted three spatial tasks: 1) visuospatial line bisection -participants were asked to bisect visually presented lines of different lengths at the perceived midpoint; 2) touch-driven tactile rod bisection in the absence of vision -participants were asked to feel the length of a wooden rod with their index finger and bisect the rod at the perceived centre; and 3) mental number line bisection in the absence of vision -participants were asked to listen to a pair of numbers and respond with the numerical midpoint between the pair. The results showed that both younger and older participants demonstrated pseudoneglect (leftward biases) in the visual, tactile and mental number line tasks and that the magnitude of pseudoneglect for each group was influenced by physical or mentally represented starting side (start left versus start right) and stimulus length. We provide an exploration of pseudoneglect in younger and older adults in different tasks that vary in the degree to which mental representations are accessed and argue that pseudoneglect is a result of a right hemisphere attentional orienting process that is retained throughout adulthood. Our results indicate that, contrary to some current models of cognitive ageing, asymmetrical patterns of hemispheric activity may occur in older age.

The Trajectory of Pseudoneglect in Adults: A Systematic Review

“…In contrast, men, as a group, did not demonstrate a trend and deviated to the left on short lines and either to the left or right on longer lines. Furthermore, DeAgostini, Curt, Tzortzis, and Dellatolas (1999) failed to find significant difference in the magnitude and direction of the bisection deviation between children, adults, and older adults, and a similar finding of insignificant differences between age groups have also been observed by others (Andrews et al 2017 ; Beste et al 2006 ; Brooks et al 2016 ; Chieffi et al 2014 ; Hatin et al 2012 ).…”

Right-lateralised lane keeping in young and older British drivers

“…Given that our results showed a positioning towards the opposite side, it is unlikely that this prior experience substantially influenced behaviour on the lane position task. It is also important to note that we observed a considerable number of older adults who, individually, did maintain a leftward bias in the landmark and line bisection tasks similar to the young group (see [ 9 , 10 , 22 ]). These older adults may represent a highly-functioning subset of the population, given that older participants are often self-selective in volunteering for lab-based experiments, and full-profile cognitive testing was unfortunately not undertaken here.…”

“…We have previously demonstrated consistent within-task spatial biases when 5 tasks were tested on two separate days, yet failed to find between-task consistency in young adults [ 7 ] (see also [ 3 ] and [ 8 ]). Relative to young adults, healthy older adults typically exhibit a group-level rightward shift of spatial bias, with either no spatial asymmetry, or a mild preference for the right hemispace ([ 9 – 20 ] but see [ 21 , 22 ] for maintained leftward biases in older age). This behavioural shift may represent diminished right hemisphere control of spatial attention in older adults [ 10 ].…”

Related but different: Examining pseudoneglect in audition, touch and vision

“…This is supported by evidence that visual and tactile hemispatial neglect are not always co-morbid within the same individual (e.g. Barbieri & De Renzi, 1989) and also that tactile and visual bisection do not seem to correlate particularly strongly in neurotypicals (Rueckert, Deravanesian, Baboorian, Lacalamita & Repplinger, 2002;Brooks, Darling, Malvaso, Della Sala, 2016).…”

“…Because sounds occurred at one location at one time, a degree of mental representation was required. If it is accepted that sequential discovery means that tactile line bisection also requires the building up of a representation is an example of representational pseudoneglect 2016), then it is apparent that both our auditory and tactile tasks rely on representational processes. The moderate correlation between these two tasks, may well reflect shared mechanisms of spatial representation in the auditory and tactile bisection tasks.…”