Intra- and inter-task reliability of spatial attention measures in healthy older adults

Gaze data of 4243 participants shows link between leftward and superior attention biases and age

Healthy individuals typically show more attention to the left than to the right (known as pseudoneglect), and to the upper than to the lower visual field (known as altitudinal pseudoneglect). These biases are thought to reflect asymmetries in neural processes. Attention biases have been used to investigate how these neural asymmetries change with age. However, inconsistent results have been reported regarding the presence and direction of age-related effects on horizontal and vertical attention biases. The observed inconsistencies may be due to insensitive measures and small sample sizes, that usually only feature extreme age groups. We investigated whether spatial attention biases, as indexed by gaze position during free viewing of a single image, are influenced by age. We analysed free-viewing data from 4,243 participants aged 5-65 years and found that attention biases shifted to the right and superior directions with increasing age. These findings are consistent with the idea of developing cerebral asymmetries with age and support the hypothesis of the origin of the leftward bias. Age modulations were found only for the first seven fixations, corresponding to the time window in which an absolute leftward bias in free viewing was previously observed. We interpret this as evidence that the horizontal and vertical attention biases are primarily present when orienting attention to a novel stimulus - and that age modulations of attention orienting are not global modulations of spatial attention. Taken together, our results suggest that attention orienting may be modulated by age and that cortical asymmetries may change with age.

Impact of aging on perceptual asymmetries for horizontal and vertical stimuli in the greyscales task

Through the paper version of the grayscale task, this study examines the impact of aging and gender on horizontal and vertical pseudoneglect in healthy right-handed Japanese people. Participants included 168 (84 women and 84 men) healthy right-handed participants between the ages of 18 and 85, which were divided into three age cohorts (i.e., young, middle, and older). When administering the task, in the horizontal condition, the stimulus set of the grayscale task waspositioned at the center of the desk. In the vertical condition, the stimulus set was placed at the participants' eye level on the front screen. A reliable left bias was observed across all age groups in the horizontal task, although individual differences in the young group were significant. Moreover, gender differences and age-gender interactions were not confirmed. Similarly, in the vertical task, an upward bias was identified in both women and men across all age groups. Furthermore, there was a weak correlation between the horizontal and vertical bias index. These results were inconsistent with those of a previous study and other research using manual line bisection and landmark tasks. Further, we comprehensively deliberated on the cognitive/neural basis of horizontal and vertical pseudoneglect.

A meta-analysis of the line bisection task in children

Meta-analyses have shown subtle, group-level asymmetries of spatial attention in adults favouring the left hemispace (pseudoneglect). However, no meta-analysis has synthesized data on children. We performed a random-effects meta-analysis of spatial biases in children aged ≤16 years. Databases (PsycINFO, Web of Science & Scopus) and pre-print servers (bioRxiv, medRxiv & PsyArXiv) were searched for studies involving typically developing children with a mean age of ≤16, who were tested using line bisection. Thirty-three datasets, from 31 studies, involving 2101 children, were included. No bias was identified overall, but there was a small leftward bias in a subgroup where all children were aged ≤16. Moderator analysis found symmetrical neglect, with right-handed actions resulting in right-biased bisections, and left-handed actions in left-biased bisections. Bisections were more leftward in studies with a higher percentage of boys relative to girls. Mean age, hand preference, and control group status did not moderate biases, and there was no difference between children aged ≤7 and ≥7 years, although the number of studies in each moderator analysis was small. There was no evidence of small study bias. We conclude that pseudoneglect may be present in children but is dependent on individual characteristics (sex) and/or task demands (hand used).Registration: Open Science Framework (https://osf.io/n68fz/).

Goal Side Selection of Penalty Shots in Soccer: A Laboratory Study and Analyses of Men's World Cup Shoot-Outs

Penalty kicks in soccer provide a unique scenario in which to examine human choice behavior under competitive conditions. Here, we report two studies examining the tendency for soccer kickers to select the goal side with the largest area to the left or right of the goalkeeper's veridical midline, when the goalkeeper stands marginally off-center. In Study I participants viewed realistic images of a soccer goal and goalkeeper with instructions to choose the left or right side of the goalmouth to best score a goal. We systematically displaced the goalkeeper's position along the goal line; and, to simulate changes in the kicker's viewing position, we systematically displaced the lateral position of the goalmouth in each image. While, overall, participants tended to choose the left over the right goal side, this preference was modulated by the goalkeeper's position relative to the center of the goal and jointly on the lateral position of the goalmouth relative to the participants' body midline. In Study II we analyzed 100 penalty shots from men's world cup shoot-outs between the years 1982 to 2018. Again, we found a small tendency for kickers to aim the ball to the left goal side, but with barely any modulating effect of changes in the goalkeeper's position and no effect of changes in the kicker's position. In contrast to earlier claims that a goalkeeper may benefit by standing marginally to the left or right of the center of the goal to influence the direction of the kicker's shot, our findings suggest that this is probably not a good strategy in elite football competitions.

A Meta-Analysis of Line Bisection and Landmark Task Performance in Older Adults

Young adults exhibit a small asymmetry of visuospatial attention that favours the left side of space relative to the right (pseudoneglect). However, it remains unclear whether this leftward bias is maintained, eliminated or shifted rightward in older age. Here we present two meta-analyses that aimed to identify whether adults aged ≥50 years old display a group-level spatial attention bias, as indexed by the line bisection and the landmark tasks. A total of 69 datasets from 65 studies, involving 1654 participants, were analysed. In the meta-analysis of the line bisection task (n = 63), no bias was identified for studies where the mean age was ≥50, but there was a clear leftward bias in a subset where all individual participants were aged ≥50. There was no moderating effect of the participant’s age or sex, line length, line position, nor the presence of left or right cues. There was a small publication bias in favour of reporting rightward biases. Of note, biases were slightly more leftward in studies where participants had been recruited as part of a stand-alone older group, compared to studies where participants were recruited as controls for a clinical study. Similarly, no spatial bias was observed in the meta-analysis of the landmark task, although the number of studies included was small (n = 6). Overall, these results indicate that over 50s maintain a group-level leftward bias on the line bisection task, but more studies are needed to determine whether this bias can be modulated by stimulus- or state-dependent factors.

The Brain’s Asymmetric Frequency Tuning: Asymmetric Behavior Originates from Asymmetric Perception

To construct a coherent multi-modal percept, vertebrate brains extract low-level features (such as spatial and temporal frequencies) from incoming sensory signals. However, because frequency processing is lateralized with the right hemisphere favouring low frequencies while the left favours higher frequencies, this introduces asymmetries between the hemispheres. Here, we describe how this lateralization shapes the development of several cognitive domains, ranging from visuo-spatial and numerical cognition to language, social cognition, and even aesthetic appreciation, and leads to the emergence of asymmetries in behaviour. We discuss the neuropsychological and educational implications of these emergent asymmetries and suggest future research approaches.

Hemispheric dominance for visuospatial attention does not predict the direction of pseudoneglect

Pseudoneglect refers to a tendency of neurologically healthy individuals to produce leftward perceptual biases during spatial tasks, which is traditionally measured using line bisection tasks. This behavioral asymmetry is often explained as a consequence of right hemispheric dominance for visuospatial attention. The present study directly tested this notion by comparing line bisection performance between left-handers with either right hemispheric dominance (RVSD, N = 40) or "atypical" left hemispheric dominance (LVSD, N = 23) for visuospatial attention as determined by fMRI. Although we expected a reversal of pseudoneglect in participants with LVSD, our results show that they equally often err to the left of the true center compared to RVSD controls (74% of LVSD participants and 80% of RVSD participants). However, the magnitude of misbisections was found to be slightly, but significantly, smaller in the LVSD subgroup.We conclude that hemispheric asymmetry for visuospatial attention is not the main determinant of pseudoneglect as is commonly thought, but rather only constitutes one of the multiple factors which (subtly) contributes to its direction and magnitude.