Right hemisphere superiority for executive control of attention

Abstract

Over forty years have passed since the first evidence showing the unbalanced attentional allocation of humans across the two visual fields, and since then, a wealth of behavioral, neurophysiological, and clinical data increasingly showed a right hemisphere dominance for orienting of attention. However, inconsistent evidence exists regarding the right-hemisphere dominance for executive control of attention, possibly due to a lack of consideration of its dynamics with the alerting and orienting functions. In this study, we used a version of the Attentional Network Test with lateralized presentation of the stimuli to the left visual field (processed by the right hemisphere, RH) and right visual field (processed by the left hemisphere, LH) to examine visual field differences in executive control of attention under conditions of alerting or orienting. Analyses of behavioral performance (reaction time and error rate) showed a more efficient executive control (reduced conflict effect) in the RH compared to the LH for the reaction time, under conditions of increased alerting and of informative spatial orienting. These results demonstrate the right-hemisphere superiority for executive control, and that this effect depends on the activation of the alerting and orienting functions.Right hemisphere advantage for executive control

Visual mental imagery engages the left fusiform gyrus, but not the early visual cortex: A meta-analysis of neuroimaging evidence

“…Functional lateralization is a fundamental organization principle of the brain, and spans across the anatomical and functional realm (Karolis et al, 2019). Besides adding additional evidence regarding the potential lateralization of VMI, this result can be put in relation to attention processes, another family of functions showing various types of brain lateralization (Heilman and Van Den Abell, 1980;Bartolomeo, 2007;Asanowicz et al, 2012;Bartolomeo, 2014;Spagna et al, 2016;Spagna et al, 2018;Bartolomeo and Seidel Malkinson, 2019). Putting together the high degree of similarity between the regions of the brain showing a consistent increase of activation associated with VMI and those associated with visual attention, it is likely that these two functions share a common bilateral neural substrate in the rostral frontal regions; a right hemisphere bias might emerge when directing attention towards external stimuli (as in visual cued tasks) (Bartolomeo and Seidel Malkinson, 2019), while a left hemisphere bias might arise when directing attention towards internally-generated stimuli (Gazzaley and Nobre, 2012) (as in the case of mental imagery).…”

Neuronal adaptation in the course of the prolonged task improves visual stimuli processing

“…There is a view that the human attentional brain network is overall lateralized to the right hemisphere (Vossel et al (2014)). Some components of the attention (e.g., alerting and disengaging functions) are bilateral (Spagna et al (2016)), while others (e.g., orienting and executive functions) are biased to the right hemisphere (Spagna et al (2018)). According to (Spagna et al (2015)), the executive functions subserve an interplay between alerting and orienting functions to maintain the state of readiness and focus attention towards the relevant features of a stimulus.…”