Extinction: Possible interference of top-down information. A case study.

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Cocchini, Gianna and Grossi, Giordana. 2016. Extinction: Possible interference of top-down information. A case study. Acta Neuropsychologica, 14(4), pp. 381-387. ISSN 1730-7503 [Article]

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Abstract or Description

Brain-damaged patients showing extinction are able to process stimuli presented on either hemispace, but fail to report contralesional stimuli when simultaneously presented with an ipsilesional stimulus. Extinction may occur stimuli of the same modality or between stimuli of different modalities (such as visual and tactile). This phenomenon has been interpreted as supramodal imbalance in stimulus competition for attention selection. However, recent studies have reported the existence of a complex interaction of competition-facilitation between visual and tactile information.
We describe a patient (RP) who suffered from a brain damage on the right occipito-temporal cortical area. RP showed severe visual neglect associated with a rare case of extinction. He performed at ceiling on tactile extinction tasks when his eyes were closed, but showed dramatic tactile extinction when he looked directly at the hand being touched.
The results as reflecting the existence of top-down mechanisms whereby the “absence” of visual information caused by visual neglect might have exacerbated underlying latent attentional biases.

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Article

Identification Number (DOI):

https://doi.org/10.5604/17307503.1227532