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Original Research ARTICLE

Brain activity during landmark and line bisection tasks

1
Department of Physiology, University of Ankara, Turkiye
2
Department of Psychology, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel
3
Department of Psychology and the Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute, University of California, USA
Neglect patients bisect lines far rightward of center whereas normal subjects typically bisect lines with a slight leftward bias supporting a right hemisphere bias for attention allocation. We used fMRI to assess the brain regions related to this function in normals, using two complementary tasks. In the Landmark task subjects were required to judge whether or not a presented line was bisected correctly. During the line bisection task, subjects moved a cursor and indicated when it reached the center of the line. The conjunction of BOLD activity for both tasks showed right lateralized intra-parietal sulcus and lateral peristriate cortex activity. The results provide evidence that predominantly right hemisphere lateralized processes are engaged in normal subjects during tasks that are failed in patients with unilateral neglect and highlight the importance of a right fronto-parietal network in attention allocation.
Keywords:
spatial attention, line bisection, fMRI, laterality
Citation:
Çiçek M, Deouell LY and Knight RT (2009). Brain activity during landmark and line bisection tasks. Front. Hum. Neurosci. 3:7. doi: 10.3389/neuro.09.007.2009
Received:
10 September 2008;
 Paper pending published:
20 November 2008;
Accepted:
09 April 2009;
 Published online:
08 May 2009.

Edited by:

Anna C. Nobre, University of Oxford, UK

Reviewed by:

Rik R. Vandenberghe, University Hospitals Leuven, Belgium; Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium
Anna C. Nobre, University of Oxford, UK
Copyright:
© 2009 Çiçek, Deouell and Knight. This is an open-access article subject to an exclusive license agreement between the authors and the Frontiers Research Foundation, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original authors and source are credited.
*Correspondence:
Metehan Çiçek, Ankara Universitesi Tip Fakultesi Fizyoloji ABD, Dekanlik Binasi, Sihhiye, Ankara TR-06100, Turkiye. e-mail: cicek@medicine.ankara.edu.tr

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