ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Neurosci.
Sec. Visual Neuroscience
Volume 19 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fnins.2025.1650468
This article is part of the Research TopicNeural Mechanisms and Clinical Advances in Binocular VisionView all articles
Exogenous spatial attention is functional in paralytic strabismics
Provisionally accepted
- 1College of Optometry, Nova Southeastern University, Fort Lauderdale, United States
- 2SUNY State College of Optometry, New York, United States
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The absence of exogenous cueing effects in patients with paralytic strabismus has been cited as evidence for an obligate linkage between movement execution and attentional allocation. The present study challenges this interpretation through two experiments that measured the impact of visual cues, intended to facilitate or inhibit shifts of spatial attention, on the latencies of target-directed responses. By including a no-cue control condition, we assessed both the presence and direction of cue-induced attentional modulation. Our results show that all patients' patterns of saccadic (Experiment I) and keypress (Experiment II) response latencies showed classic signatures of cue-target interactions: movements initiated in response to targets spatially proximate to cues were initiated fastest whereas movements initiated towards targets spatially distal from cues were initiated slowest. This trend held true when grouping latencies by cue-saccade offset to account for small errors in saccade landing position in Experiment I. Though the patients' data exhibited small degrees of idiosyncrasy, most patients' mean normalized latencies also fell within the range of latencies observed in non-strabismic participants. These findings support the notion that premotor structures may program attentional shifts in an effector-independent manner and motivate future investigations to explore how, not if, exogenous spatial attention is deployed in paralytic strabismics.
Keywords: overt attention, covert attention, Premotor theory, exogenous attention, paralyticstrabismus
Received: 19 Jun 2025; Accepted: 29 Aug 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Willeford and McPeek. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Kevin T. Willeford, College of Optometry, Nova Southeastern University, Fort Lauderdale, United States
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