Parietal lobe mechanisms of spatial attention: modality-specific or supramodal?

Abstract

Is the spatial attention system divided into separate, modality-specific subsystems, or is there a supramodal spatial attention system? More specifically, does the role of the parietal lobe in spatial attention involve modality-specific or supramodal mechanisms? We addressed this question using a variant of Posner's spatial cuing task. Parietal-lesioned patients performed a simple reaction time task to lateralized visual target stimuli, preceded on each trial by either non-predictive lateralized visual cue stimuli or non-predictive lateralized auditory cue stimuli. With both types of cues, we found disproportionate slowness in responding to invalidly cued contralesional targets, indicative of an impairment in disengaging attention from the ipsilesional to the contralesional side of space. The finding of an attentional disengagement impairment for visual targets with auditory cues implies that the parietal lobe's attentional mechanism operates on a representation of space in which both visual and auditory stimuli are represented, in other words, a supramodal representation of space.